The Great California Adventure (a.k.a. J and Lily's Road Trip): Day 1

Disclaimer:
I've been debating about how much of this trip to record on the blog for awhile now. As many of you already know from Facebook, we were involved in a roll-over car accident on our second day out.... Although everyone was essentially fine, it was big drama (of course!) and really put a damper on the vacation. We continued on though and did have fun, though some was subdued.

I think I have ultimately decided that I'll gloss over some parts of the trip, but go into excruciating detail for other parts. So, feel free to just look at the pictures and skim through these upcoming posts.

Day 1: CO to Utah
The original point of this trip was to take Marc's car out to him at college. (The car my parents owned, that he used.) Mom didn't want to drive out by herself as she has done that before, so she came up with the idea of me coming along for the ride/ to help drive. If I came, Jonathan comes too, so then we would bring him and Lily to Disneyland, as a bonus.

A 2 year old and a 3 year old, confined to their car seats, for multiple entire days is a scary concept...

Therefore, we came prepared with many snacks, a few dollar store "gifts," a.k.a. new toys to play with in the car, and fun music for mom and I's sanity.

Run down of the day: a few meltdowns (mostly by J), some fighting over what toy was whose, neither would go to sleep after lunch for nap time. In desperation, we eventually stopped for ice cream in the late afternoon. It seems backwards to load them up with sugar, but it worked. They both eventually fell asleep, but not until 4pm!
So we kept driving, past the town we were originally going to stop in, to give them a good long nap. This caused us to arrive to the new town later, and a late dinner, but the ice cream held everyone over.

Some observations about Utah. The eastern part that we were driving through that afternoon is a lot of dirt and rocks. There is also a 100 mile stretch of nothing. Literally No Man's Land. Except, the strange thing, is that parts of it are truly beautiful. It is not a waste land or a bad land. There was some spectacular scenery that I caught as we drove by. Maybe someday we'll take a trip out just to stop and visit the canyons and rock formations.