We had a great weekend with Mark, Tevis, and Miles, but the visit didn't end there. On Tuesday, it was back to work, and we each retreated to our spaces to get some business done. For me, there was a big week of conference calls, and having Mark and Tevis around, going through the same thing, made our little retreat feel almost like a small office. Having the extra good energy of friends around certainly made the work go down a little easier. And, of course, this time was priceless for the boys.
Midway through the week it occurred to all of us that the idea of departing on Friday just wouldn't do. We were having such an amazing time that we decided to extend our stay in Santa Fe until Sunday. That meant two extra days to visit, explore, and have fun.
Saturday, we made a return trip to Bandelier, again feeling that our visitors would enjoy the park as much as we did. Sure enough, Miles and Nate had an amazing time climbing about the cliff dwellings (with masks on and with parents close behind with lots of hand sanitizer!).
By Sunday we'd been in Santa Fe so long that life was starting to feel almost normal ... which meant, of course, that it was time to get back on the road. We all got up at the crack of dawn Sunday morning and hit the trail, the Michelyra's heading back west, and us starting the biggest push east that we'd made yet. In fact, it was strange to think that after 2 months we'd only made it about 12 hours from Long Beach. Certainly we'd traveled a LOT, but we'd rambled up down and all around. This time was different; we were pointing the car east and going for 10 hours straight - to Cottonwood Falls, Kansas. Neither Rachel nor I had ever spent any time in the Great Plains, so we weren't really sure what to expect. What we found was a lot of this ...
And even more of this ...
By the time we arrived in Cottonwood Falls, we were road weary in a way that I now believe can only come from a full day driving through a whole bunch of nothing. To make matters worse, things like distances and addresses don't really mean too much where were were going. We'd picked our next home specifically because of it's remoteness, which meant several miles down a dirt road, far from pretty much anything.
When we finally arrived, this is what it looked like:
I'd swear on a stack of Bibles that I'd seen this place in a horror movie before. Thankfully, when we went inside, the place went from haunted mansion to an adorable little house on the prairie.
Here's the new map:
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