Our Christmas Trip

I haven't written recently because we have been away from home on a trip to Iowa to spend the holiday with Susan's sister, Margaret and her family, husband Phil and son Neil. It did not seem prudent to announce the emptiness of our house here and allow the scumbags of the InterWeb to come and rip us off. But then again, that assumes that there are people reading this and you and I both know the truth there.


Anyway, I decided to start a post and get some of the Holiday fun reported before it all slips away from my feeble mind, but not publish it until we return.

We left town bright and early last Saturday and left pretty close to the time we planned on...7:30AM instead of 7:00. We took it easy this trip and didn't do the marathon drive through the night to get here. We made it as far as Gillette, Wyoming the first day. That was twelve hours and 776 miles. We drove another 761 miles the next day and arrived in Des Moines about 9:45PM.


The drive was uneventful and easy as the weather favored us the whole way, except for some slight fogginess for the first 100 miles.


Now we are here and enjoying festive Holiday festiveness with family and friends. We have enjoyed many traditional activities that Susan and Margaret have planned like touring the Salisbury House, seeing the Jolly Holiday Lights, going to the Art Center to see art and things that are called art but really aren't, and drinking beer.


Today, we are traveling to the Amana's and Amish Land to see how they build refrigerators. I'll have a more detailed report later.


While it is cold here in Des Moines, we have no snow. In fact, we saw very little evidence of snow the whole way here.  There was a huge snow storm a couple days ago that spread from New Mexico to Kansas. It shut down freeways and stranded travelers. The storm stopped short of effecting Iowa or any of our return travel route. I am hoping for clear sailing when we return home but I would also enjoy a white Christmas.