Or, more appropriately, driving on one.
We just returned from our three week trek to and from Utah. On Monday, December 17th, we loaded up two suitcases, three dufflebags, one cooler, four backpacks, blankets and pillows, and five kids into our beat up old minivan and headed off on the 2200 mile drive.
Matt and I prefer to drive straight through. We leave in the evening and arrive in the morning of the second day. This gives us two eight or nine hour stretches where the kids are asleep and not begging to go to the bathroom or fighting and they really only have one day of driving to contend with so it is still novel. It is an intense 36 hours, but we survive. We decided to go the southern route through New Mexico and southern Colorado and Utah. They are tiny little highways through nothingness, but they usually get less snow. Since a gigantic storm (big enough to give it a name on the weather channel) was covering both northern routes on the days we were supposed to be coming through, the southern route was it, even though it added six hours of driving time.
The first 24 hours were great. The kids were super excited and getting along. Matt and I were doing well, even though I was eleven weeks along (the worst time for me to be in the car! ugh!). (And that's called burying the lead).
Our DVD player was broken, but I am actually glad. I would have thought about limiting it, but it would be far to easy to plug in entertainment. Instead, the kids read and played...and looked out the window! They saw the countryside. They noticed cows and windmills. In Texas, Mary stared out the window and exclaimed in awe, "Look at the sky! It's so big!" They would have missed all of that. Now they know what Texas looks like (at least Northern Texas, off the freeway). They made connections with the landscape in Oklahoma and the Trail of Tears which they had been learning about in school. Joe was especially interested because he realized that some of his ancesters almost without doubt were victims of that. They marveled at the bridges and the Saint Louis Arch.
How idealic and wonderful.
Why didn't I see it coming? Okay, that makes it sound a lot more dramatic and tragic than it really was. Tragic, no, but the second night was certainly interesting. Just north of Albuquerque, we hit rain. An hour later, we were clobbered by the snow we were trying to avoid. I left Cortez, and the snow intensified. I couldn't see the lines on the road...and then our defrost stopped working. With our windshield wipers (both in need of replacement), I maintained passable visibility for another hour or so. Every couple of hours we would come to a tiny town and every time the snow thinned out, so we decided to proceed. We never went more than fifteen minutes before the blizzard started up again in earnest. Joe woke up somewhere in the middle of this and I told him to start praying.
At two in the morning (after three hours of driving in the snow) we reached Monticello. We parked in a Maverik parking lot to rest, exhausted and frazzled. It was then that we realized no heat was coming from the vents. Cold air seeped from every vent. Every bit as cold as the 15 degree weather outside. We couldn't stay there in the freezing weather with kids just recovering from the seasonal flu. We decided to continue on in the snow.
At five o'clock in the morning, we finally reached the I-70 interchange. It was iced over. We went through Price and over Soldier Summit to exit the canyon at Spanish Fork, Utah. Somewhere in the canyon, we ran out of windshield wiper fluid (the only thing keeping ice off the windshield).
I have no idea how we made it through that canyon.
On Thursday morning, after spending all of Wednesday recouperating, Matt took the car to a repair shop. Our radiator was completely shot (and as we found out on the way home - another fun story - we are leaking anti-freeze) and our blower motor for the heater had gone out.
It was nutty, and a little scary at times, but we made it safely. I know we made it on a prayer.
