Vacation! Or, perhaps not.

A wise friend once told me, "There are vacations, and there are family trips." Truer words were never spoken! We just returned from a long family trip. Our experiences ranged from exhilarating mountain hikes to never-ending litanies of "Are we there yet?" "He touched me!" "Can't we watch a different DVD?", from hands-on all-day fun at a museum to "How many more miles until lunch?"

Jeff had to work in Albuquerque, so we left Dallas on a Friday and drove to New Mexico. We spent a weekend in Taos; a day hiking at Sandia Peak in Albuquerque--home of the world's longest tramway, a breath-taking 2.7 mile ride that has you dangling 945 above mountain canyons; three days in Snowflake, AZ visiting my sister and her 5 kids; another day in Albuquerque at Explora!, the most involved and interactive kids' museum I've ever seen; and then a long, leisurely drive along Historic Route 66 back through NM and OK and finally back to Texas.

My kids are huge fans of the Pixar film Cars. If you watch the extras on the DVD, John Lasseter (the director) mentions that the creators rented RVs and spent time driving the length of Route 66 while they were working on the story. Each character and building in Radiator Springs is based on a real person or place. We followed Route 66 and saw:

• The restored U-Drop-Inn in Shamrock, Texas, which in the film is Ramone's Body Shop
• The Wig-Wam Motel in Holbrook, AZ, one of only two remaining and the inspiration for the Cozy Cone Motel
• The leaning water tower in Groom, TX outside of Amarillo on which the Leaning Tower of Tires is based
• Cadillac Ranch, which shows up in the film as a backdrop of mountains (Cadillac Range)
• The original orange combine that's turned into Frank, the bull that guards the tractor cows

Aaaaaand of course we listened to the Cars soundtrack about thirty times along the way.

We made the drive from Albuquerque to Snowflake without Jeff. That in & of itself was an adventure! My sister's five kids are about the same age as my first five kids, so the three days there went by in a blur...eleven kids ages 4mo to 10, all inseparable and trying to cram in a year's worth of play into just a couple of days.

When we joined back up with Jeff back in Albuquerque, our original plan was to spend a couple of hours at a children's museum and then head out to a waterpark. The first exhibit we walked into was a giant marbleworks set. We spent an hour in just that section and still had to drag the kids out of there! By the time we'd been there for ninety minutes, we hadn't even made it past the second exhibit. We ended up scrapping the waterpark and spent seven hours at the museum, still didn't get to play with everything and only left because the museum closed and they had to kick everybody out. Had we known how much fun it was, we would've planned two whole days to spend there.

The drive home could have been as quick as ten hours if we'd pushed it really hard, but we stretched it out and took the long scenic road. We followed the old 66 road as much as possible and went through Oklahoma instead of heading straight back to Texas. Jeff is really a get-there-and-get-it-done kind of person, so taking the slow way home was quite an adjustment for him, but even he had to admit that seeing the old road and all of the abandoned (and in many cases, restored) buildings and places was really a fun thing to do.

I'm currently uploading and organizing our trip pictures onto my MySpace page. Probably won't blog a whole lot until I get caught up around the house. I have a heckalotta laundry to do...