ROAD TRIP

I’m going on a road trip!

Well, I am driving 8 hours to Carson City to attend a training that I did not want to fly to… Have I mentioned that I. DON’T. FLY.

Same Thing!

I have made this drive several times in the past couple of years. We made the drive 3 or 4 times when we moved to Las Vegas 2 years ago. We made it a couple of times before that when we visited here. I have made the drive once since I have lived here to go back to visit. But this time, I will be trying to stay on track eating and exercise wise. I can already say that this is not going to happen all the way. I have a couple of friends that I will be meeting for dinner and I will not stay on plan for those meals. The rest of the time, though, I hope to be on plan. I also hope to continue to exercise, even if it is just walking. I am staying with my mom while up there, and she is also on Nutrisystem so I am hoping that this will help. I will be bringing food with me for the meals that are not out with friends.

I am going to Texas Roadhouse with a couple of friends on Sunday for dinner. I am studying the menu to see what the best options are. I have concluded that there is not a lot of healthy options there.

I am going out for sushi with another friend on Monday night. I have looked at that menu to make my choices, but then I realized that the restaurant that she wants to go to is closed on Mondays!!! So we will have to find another restaurant to go to.

This brings back memories of moving to Carson City from Florida. We took 3 weeks to drive cross country to move to Nevada.
We went to several places that I have wanted to go. We stopped to see family. We went to Mississippi three times. THREE TIMES! We would drive for 6, 7, 8 hours a day and then stay in little motels along the way (except a couple of places where we had reservations). It was me, my mother and my aunt in two cars with loads of stuff. All of our other belongings were being moved in a truck and arrived at our house 2 days after we did. We slept on air mattresses for the first two nights that we were in our new home.

That road trip was a little more intense. The day we were supposed to leave, my mother had to go to the dentist for an emergency, so I left before they did so that I could go meet some friends who were at a training in (very) rural Northern Florida. Then we went to Mississippi (the first time) and stayed at a motel across the street from the Beau Rivage in Biloxi. Then we went to New Orleans and spent a couple of days. It was the French Quarter festival, which is the second most popular festival after Mardi Gras. There were lots and lots and LOTS of people there. The city smelled like urine and vomit. There were drunk people everywhere you looked. It ruined my vision of the city that I had fantasized about my entire life. I was glad to leave.

We then went to go see a friend of my mother in a tiny town called Scottsville, Kentucky. It is outside Bowling Green. The friend and her family live in a Mennonite community in very rural Kentucky. They had no electricity on their farm, they had running water only because they invented a mechanism to get it from a stream on their property. They had cows and horses and raised Australian Shepherds. It was an amazing time. There are 9 children in the family, the 3 oldest had moved away and had their own lives but the younger all lived on the farm. In a home that they had built by hand using discarded wood from neighboring farms and barns. Luckily for us, they had a mobile home on the property that had electricity and running water, and that is where we stayed. Which is good, because I don’t think I could have handled the OUTHOUSE.

When we left the farm, we went to Graceland. The home of Elvis. It was so cool, and my aunt is a HUGE Elvis fan. When we were leaving Graceland, there was a sign for Tunica, Mississippi… casinos in the middle of Mississippi. (I think it’s funny that everywhere we went there happened to be casinos, or maybe we just were able to FIND the casinos).

After the third time in Mississippi, we decided to start moving West. We went to Tulsa Oklahoma to see family and then went to Amarillo Texas, where we spent the night. It was there, that we noticed the U-Haul that was “following” us. It really wasn’t, we just happened to keep seeing the truck. It wasn’t hard to spot since it had a giant spider on the side.

After Texas, we went to Albuquerque, NM. My mother and aunt have a couple of plots of land there that we wanted to check out. We stayed at a hotel with a casino (wonders of wonders). We were there for a couple of days. Then we continued on to Flagstaff.

I am not sure that we were actually supposed to stay in Flagstaff, but on the way through Arizona, we hit a sandstorm. This thing was horrible. I was driving behind a semi-trailer and watched the back of it be lifted off the ground. I backed off the truck and a few miles latter the truck was on its side in a ditch. We got through the sandstorm and decided that we were going to stop for the night due to the stress. We stayed in Flagstaff at a motel right off the freeway. I didn’t like Flagstaff (at least getting there). The next day we went to Kingman Arizona which is where I had my last meal at Cracker Barrel restaurant. It is the last one on this trip. We had been going there the whole trip because they are all over off freeways, but there are no more after Kingman…

Then we went to Barstow California. There was some kind of motorcycle rally going on in that town. It was loud but I love motorcycles. We drove through Hinckley, California which is the town behind the Julia Roberts movie “Erin Brockovich.” We did not drink the water.

Then we drove up 395 into Nevada, I saw my first snow in 25 years at Mount Whitney in Lone Pine, California. We stayed at a motel geared toward fishermen in Bishop, California. There was a fish cleaning room and the whole motel smelled like fish, eww! We went to Mammoth lakes and went up the gondola to the mountain. It was cold, I was from South Florida, It was April and I was not used to that! We drove by Mono Lake, which seemed like an alien landscape. And then, finally, we entered Nevada at Topaz Lake. We were a day early so we stopped at every little motel and there seemed to be like 5 things going on at once, there was a dog show and a volleyball tournament. There were NO motel rooms in the entire town. So we drove up to Reno and stayed at the Atlantis. Which was good, because my aunt won some money at the casino (again, a casino!). The next day, we headed back to Carson City and got to our new home. A townhouse that we had signed a 7 month lease on, sight unseen. It was good though. It was right in the middle of town (not hard to do). We went to Walmart and bought air mattresses and then froze our butts off that night. They delivered our stuff the next day and my mom’s car got delivered a few days later. And then, it was home.