Cross Country Adventure Part 1: Barely getting through California

We have arrived in Bloomington, Indiana!  Yesterday I had orientation, which has helped me feel much more at ease about starting school and jumping into designing a show.  I'm feeling pretty stoked about it all.  Ben is working really hard to move us in and has already found an audition for the Jewish Theatre of Bloomington.

Now for pictures from our trip!

 

 This is a google map of our route.  We took about 5 days to drive just over 2800 miles.

The first leg of the trip brought us to Paso Robles and San Luis Obsipo where we spent some time visiting with the Andersons, Kleinmans, and Ben's parents.  Ben's parents are also planning a move to Paso Robles.  Though not as far as Indiana, they had a lot more stuff to organize/get rid of than we did.  They also had to prepare the house for people to walk through.

Early(ish) Saturday morning we left for the second leg of the trip: to Draper, Utah.  The longest leg by four hours.  It was daunting but we were ready for it!  Not to mention that the following days' trips would seem easy by comparison.

So we started out!

We decided to stop for lunch in Tehachapi.  As we pulled off the the highway we failed to notice that the engine temperature spiked.  By the time we parked the Engine-temp gauge reached it's height and chimed at us to cool it down.  We got out and (after being greeted by a seemingly lost BYU hat) noticed that what looked to be the entire radiator's worth of coolant was pouring out from underneath the car.  So we decided to ignore the problem while we got lunch at the Mediterranean Delicatessen.

We had delicious sandwiches and ok sodas.

 

See?  Random BYU hat!  Right in front of our car.  A good omen, I think.

Following lunch we went on a journey to find an open garage.  You see, it was Mountain Festival, so many garages were closed for the festivities.  We wandered around downtown, enjoying the sites as we went.  For example: sidewalk chalk art!  There were some nice pieces like these:

But the ones that gave the greatest joy were some of the more simplistic pieces hopefully done by children.

This one is my personal favorite - Ben doesn't quite agree with my taste.

Along with sidewalk art, there were some cool permanent murals on the walls like this one on the side of the movie theater:

There were also a bunch of street vendors, and a rodeo!

Then we remembered why we were there and we continued our search for a garage.  Every gas station we stopped at recommended a different garage, which were all ultimately closed.  We had to resort to using a phone book that we found on an actual pay phone!

Remember pay phones?  I barely do, either, but we found one!

Then I remembered that I have AAA, duh!  So we called them and they recommended a garage that was open.  After calling them three times because the directions they gave us were terrible, we finally arrived.  Once there it was another hour before the problem was discovered:  We had been driving 71mph up a hill with about 1000 extra lbs. of stuff in the car.  So the mechanic taught us about drive and overdrive and told us not to push the car to hard.

Because we had been stopped for about 3hrs, we decided we would only go as far as Mesquite, NV.  Although it cut down our visiting time in Utah, I have to admit that it was nice to stop driving early.  

The Virgin River Hotel was pretty darn nice and we had a delicious and HUGE(ly inexpensive) breakfast at the casino restaurant.

Ben got the breakfast special, the fruit was my order, but it was large enough to share (and then some).  Ben especially appreciated the use of flash in the restaurant :D

So, I must explain that I did not consciously order three pancakes this large.  I asked the waitress how big the short stack was and she explained/showed that they were two 6" diameter pancakes.  Normal, home-cooked sized.  The regular stack has three pancakes.  So, for a few cents more I ordered the regular stack.  Little did I know they were going to be 9" plate sized pancakes!!!

Needless to say I could only eat half, and merely a portion of the fruit.

From there we began our journey to Utah - but we'll save that for another time seeing as how I've left Ben to unpack and fix things and I have work to do already!  Yay!