Niagara Falls

Nothing reminds me more of a "family road trip" than Niagara Falls. Maybe Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam too. Those boring things you go see because it's family friendly and very Americana. Niagara Falls we went to see because it was part of my assignment for a class. I went there as a kid and remember waiting in line forever on the Canadian side in those dumb ponchos to go to the cave behind the falls or whatever. It was okay. 

Before we left we had to make funny faces of course...

Ellie's first state park!

Joe had never been to Niagara Falls before. I thought that was weird because he grew up in New York all his life until he moved with me to Alaska. I thought everyone had gone there as a kid at some point!

We both had this irrational fear of somehow dropping Ellie down the waterfall. 

Those big piles of snow are actually mountains of ice from the waterfall.

Road Trip Scrapbook - Finished!

It took me quite a while to take some snapshots of our finished scrapbook from our 2013-2014 road trip. I find that making scrapbooks for everyday life is a little boring and I can't motivate myself to keep up. I tend to make scrapbook for things like road trips and vacations, like I did for my 2012 visit to New York (when I unexpectedly got engaged AND married) although I still haven't made a scrapbook for our formal wedding ceremony OR our honeymoon! Talk about inconsistent!

Going through and looking at these scrapbooks brings back so many great memories that just plain photo snapshots couldn't capture.

In fact, I don't know why I even stopped adding to this scrapbook! I still have a ton of Instax film, there are still tons of empty pages in the Smashbook and my scrapbook kit I put together for travel is still in its box. I think I will resume scrapping until I run out of space! Let's make it a promise. Maybe I will do a biweekly update of my progress on the blog as well.

The End of the Road

So our road trip is actually over! I can't believe how it flew by. I also can't believe the changes we went through along the way. Not only did my belly grow bigger but we went from the frozen tundra of the arctic to living on a boat, into the fog and rain, ancient forests, the coastlines sunny beaches, the dry desert, country farmland and now I suppose we are now near swamplands. We haven't really gotten the chance to check out the bayous or any other "Louisiana stuff" yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I feel like we have had enough driving for now and taking a trip to New Orleans would be a little too much. I'm happy to hang out in the hotel until we get a house. We have been sleeping a whole lot, that's for sure! Road trips are exhausting.

Speaking of a house, my mind is absolutely going crazy with DIY home decor and furniture redos! I have so many plans and I have no idea how long it will take me to get them done. We took a little trip into town to see what it had to offer in the way of home improvements. Thank goodness there is a Lowes! I have a feeling it will be my best friend.

I promise no more "vacation photos" after this. But I chose one favorite shot from each day of our trip to show how far we went (excluding boring days where we didn't take any.) We drove over 4,000 miles in total. I felt SO happy that the car made it the whole way with no trouble! We had a really close call in an Diego when a truck in front of us didn't secure some metal pieces it was hauling and one fell off onto the road. We didn't have time to stop and ran right over it! It got stuck under the car and was dragging along the road. We had to pull over and a stranger came to help us get it out. Lucky for us nothing got damaged and we made it just fine. We also made it almost the whole way without getting pulled over. Unfortunately, a mere 22 miles from our final destination, we got pulled over for speeding. No biggie though!

I'm really happy we got to make this trip. Since I was in college it has always been a dream of mine to drive across the country in an old Volkswagen bus. I imagined stopping along the road to sleep by the beach and play my little ukulele on the roof at sunset... how bucolic! Maybe I didn't get my little Volkswagen and I certainly never got the hang of playing ukulele, but I had the best possible experience! Going from Alaska all the way to the deep south never crossed my mind years ago when I dreamt of this cross country trip, but now that I've done it I wouldn't have it any other way.