Backroads and Byways

Whew! I am finally home, we had an awesome drive! Sometimes frustrating, sometimes wonderful.

First, the show went great, my sales were up by about 5% over last year, which means that it was my best show ever, in that venue! I came home with less inventory, and some new ideas.

We left on Monday morn, drove towards Arizona on Hwy 40, and somewhere on that road had a flat tire on the trailer. After a lot of interesting language, we managed to get the tire changed. *note to self, when packing up trailer, make sure tools are handy, so next time we don't have to unpack 1/2 of it on the side of the highway! We made it to Kingman, and found a tire shop, there we discovered that not only was the flat tire bad, the other good one was in tough shape too. Something we SHOULD have checked before we ever left home. We ended up buying 3 new tires (spare wasn't in very good shape either).

As we were hooking the trailer back up, one of the repair men mentioned that our van seemed to be riding low. We had noticed it earlier, but didn't think anything of it. Upon further inspection, the shocks on the back of the van were SHOT! And I mean SHOT, there was no spring in them at all. This makes me mad at my local shop, we had a brake job done just before we left, the guys there should have SEEN the bad shocks, and said something. It was very obvious, even I could see they were bad. So guess what? We ended up having them replaced too, and you can't just do the ones on the back end, so we did the front end ones too. I have to say the guys who did the work were very nice, they ended up working 2 hours past the normal closing time.

After paying the bill (good thing my show was a good one!) we made it to Williams that night, ate and found a hotel.

Tuesday we were up early and off to see the Grand Canyon, this was my 3rd or 4th visit there, and I don't think I will ever get tired of it. What a beautiful place! We left the Canyon while it was still daylight, ate and filled our tank in Cameron and drove through the Navajo lands in Northern Arizona towards Colorado. This is a beautiful part of the country, we were driving through at night under a full moon. I have to say the land was enchanting. We drove past the turn to Monument Valley, and I want to go back someday and see it in the daylight.

We spent the night in Cortez Colorado, and spent Wednesday trekking through Mesa Verde National Park. Oh my! I get chills even typing about it! The thought that these people were living there in a complete society as far back as 600 AD is awesome. We did a tour of some of the ruins, did a driving tour on the Mesa top and had a wonderful afternoon. After leaving the park we only drove about an hour, both to tired to go any further.

Thursday we woke up early to new snow on the ground and a storm on the way! We hightailed it out of there as quick as we could. Raced over the passes in front of the storm. They closed the passes about an hour later. For these flatlanders driving on mountain passes pulling a trailer is already a white knuckle experience. Driving it in winter on snow........well the knuckles are still recovering. And I was the passenger! *nother note to self.......pack tire chains in trailer, next to door, NOT under boxes, next to jack.

The rest of the drive was uneventful, we arrived at home last night about 9PM. I did take a LOT of pictures in the parks. I will load them off my camera to the puter, and put the best of them up on my webshots page.

Now to get caught up on all the paperwork, accounting and mail that piled up in the 2 weeks I was on the road!

CYA
Jenny P
http://www.quiltedinclay.com/