Parts 2 and 3 of The Journey

Hi everyone!  Sorry I didn't get a post up yesterday, I tried posting today from my iPhone but it was giving me attitude and wouldn't work properly.  To make up for it, there's a ton of pictures from the last two days of our trip.

Tuesday morning started with us leaving the "Settle Inn" which was the hotel shaped like a castle that I mentioned in the last post.  Pictures of that below.  The entire day was spent driving through Nebraska and Wyoming.  Nebraska was boring.  Very boring.  Just a lot of fields and flat land, the exits were fairly far apart and there just wasn't much to look at.  This was a good six or seven hours, but finally things started to get interesting as we got into Wyoming.  

Wyoming takes the cake for the most beautiful state we've driven through so far.  Mountains and plateaus everywhere, just the most amazing scenery and landscapes.  We didn't get all the way through Wyoming on Tuesday, but today we finished it up.  A lot of the pictures below are of Wyoming, including a rest stop along the way that was in a particularly nice bit of land.  At the rest stop were tons of little prairie dogs, and they weren't even a little bit afraid of us.  Lindsey took a bit of my leftover cinnamon roll and fed the little guys.  It was just too cute.  This rest stop is where the really up close photos of the mountainside were taken, and we spent some time here just enjoying the scenery.  It was pretty spectacular.  I also bought Lindsey a little bear at a gift shop along the way, and there's a picture of him enjoying the ride as well.

An interesting item that dots the Wyoming countryside is the wind turbine, and boy did we see a lot of them, and relatively closely, too.  These things are gigantic.  I had read about them and seen pictures of them, but never actually seen on in front of me.  In case you don't know, the turbine spins in the wind (Wyoming is also the windiest place I've ever been) and generates electricity.  It's a clean, environmentally friendly way to generate power and is becoming a more popular choice for some areas.  One of those propeller blades is about the length of a 747, if not even a bit bigger.  Pictures of those below too.

Then we got into Utah, which looked a lot like Wyoming and was also very pretty.  Nothing of any real excitement happened in Utah, other than we drove on through it and got to Nevada.

Nevada was a lot of desert, but not the kind of desert I expected.  There was a fair amount of greenery and there were mountains on the horizon (and sometimes closer) the whole drive through the state.  I did get pictures of a couple patches of just sand though, including some pure white sand.  I had never seen white sand before.  But after that it just was a long drive through country that looked the same the whole way.  It was dark by the time we got to Reno, but we pressed on and ended up in California!

That's right, we started today in Wyoming and ended it inside California's borders.  We're only about 128 miles outside of San Francisco right now, and tomorrow is due to be a big, big day.  We're heading onward and will drive through Sacramento and then make a stop at IKEA to pick up a few furniture items.  I personally believe that IKEA is actually why Lindsey agreed to the trip in the first place ;-)  Then onward to our new apartment building and the rest of the day spent moving boxes.

But more on that tomorrow!  Hopefully, that is...I don't have internet set up in the new apartment yet, but I will do my best to make some sort of post.  Until you hear from us again, enjoy the onslaught of pictures to follow below.  Thanks for the comments everyone left on the last post, I read them to Lindsey in the car and we had some good laughs.  It's great to hear from everyone in any manner, and we look forward to talking to you all soon!