Retro Wednesday: Road Trips

The fall of 2007 was my brief stint as a single mom. Niles was in Utah and I was in Arizona, waiting for our house to sell. During the week I did O.K. because during the day I could pretend that Niles was just at work, as usual, instead of too many miles away. (Until the evening, anyway, when he didn't come home!) I dreaded the weekends, though, because they were long and lonely. So I decided that I could mope around or I could do something to make it more bearable. I made a list of places in Arizona that I had always wanted to visit but hadn't made it to yet, packed up the kids in the car, and started checking places off the list. Niles isn't big on road trips so he didn't mind missing out on them. Jumble feels the same about road trips as her dad, so she always stayed home or found a friend to hang out with--that's why she isn't in any of the photos.

Our first trip was to Tuscon:

This is Jet, Atom, and Minnie posing at Saguro National Park.

And later in the day we visited Mission San Xavier del Bac. Too bad they were doing some restoration work at the time, so half of the mission was covered with scaffolding and tarp. So our photo wasn't as great as I'd hoped.

Another weekend we visited Montezuma's Castle and Tuzigoot National Monument (both Native American ruins.)

This is Montezuma's Castle. It is pretty impressive.

This is later in the day at Tuzigoot--we actually got to go inside and on top of this ruin. The red bird is a stuffed cardinal that sings that we had just purchased at the gift shop. Jet still loves that thing!

The last place we made it to before moving was the Grand Canyon. This was in early October and it was windy and the kids thought it was pretty cold. Now they know what cold really feels like. It was sunny, though, and we had a great time despite the fact it was a bit nippy.

I wish we had been able to visit a few more places, but I'm glad our time being apart didn't last much longer. I'm glad I was able to show my children a little bit more of the amazing state where they were born before we moved. And it helped us all feel a bit happier during a difficult time in our lives.