December 31, 2022 by suzanne day by day

2022 Round-Up-a-Rama

It’s time for my annual year-end recap!

(If you’re so inclined, you can read past versions of my responses: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017,
2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009. This yearly recap originated with Linda of All & Sundry.)

I feel such tenderness for Last Year Me, who was feeling “down, down, down” at the end of last year. This year, I feel the exact opposite. I feel fulfilled in so many ways, so happy, so content. So full of plans and hope for the year ahead. It’s the end of a week at home with my two favorite people, and three days of our joint holiday to go. Christmas is still up, and – while I’m itching to dismantle it – it doesn’t feel oppressive just yet. I’ve been contemplating 2023 plans, but just in an idle, cheerful way. Things are good. I feel so grateful. It’s such a difference from the past couple of years, where I was mainly exhausted and stressed fearful about what new devastation lay in store. I do not take this period of calm and contentedness for granted. Instead, I am soaking it up, reveling in it, all too aware of how swiftly life can change.

Let’s take a look back at 2022.

One change to note: In years past, I left in the original questions even if I ignored them. This year, I am deleting them entirely. Buh-bye, old irrelevant-to-my-life questions I do not want to answer.

What did you do in 2022 that you’d never done before?
- Began querying agents.
- Saw a podiatrist.
- Took an online writing class (about querying).
- Went on a family road trip across the United States.
- Got Covid.
- Posted every day in November for NaBloPoMo!
- Tried acupuncture.

Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

As is my newish tradition, I made some gentle aspirations for the year. Out of 22 things I hoped to accomplish, I completed half. Well, there’s always next year!

How old were you on your birthday and what did you do? I turned 41 in February, ordered my own cake (which turned out to be a disappointment), and spent a lovely evening with my husband and daughter. I am sure it involved Mexican takeout and books, because those are two of my favorite things.

Where did you travel this year?

My husband and daughter and I made two trips this year, but we visited many states! Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

What would you like to have in 2023 that you lacked in 2022?

Re-upping one of my major wishes from last year: I would like to have an agent in 2023. This is part luck and part grit, and I need to supply the grit.

What dates from 2022 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

I absolutely loved our road trip in June of 2022. It was so fabulous. Two weeks in the car with my husband and daughter, and we had fun and saw parts of the country we’d never seen and listened to audiobooks and good music and just generally had a fabulous time.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Beginning the querying process.

What was your biggest failure?

Not finishing either of the new manuscripts I started! I need to work on follow through in 2023!

Did you suffer illness or injury?

My husband and I both got Covid during the tail end of our road trip. Womp womp.

What was the best thing you bought?

My new laptop! I kept insisting to my husband that I didn’t need a new one; my old laptop worked perfectly fine. But it really didn’t work perfectly fine and it was slow and the keys were sticky and the lack of memory was a real bother. I am very glad he pushed me to get a new one.

What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Our road trip! My parents moving here!

What song(s) will always remind you of 2022?

(Most of these are from our road trip – we listened to a bunch of songs on repeat in the car.)

I Love U by the Chainsmokers

Ojitos Lindos by Bad Bunny (feat. Bomba Estereo)

As It Was by Harry Styles

Ghost by Justin Bieber

The Turning Red soundtrack

The Winnie the Pooh soundtrack

I Hate Myself for Loving You by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana

Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow) by Fleetwood Mac

Fade Into You by Mazzy Star

Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush

What do you wish you’d done more of?

Writing (evergreen item). Exercising. Eating vegetables. Spending time outdoors. Date nights. Game nights. Agent queries.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

Mindless scrolling on my phone. Feeling sorry for myself about my feet. Dwelling in a pit of self-abnegation.

How did you spend Christmas?

Christmas was just me, my husband, and my daughter this year. But it was perfect. We slept in until 7:30 and then opened wonderful, thoughtful presents from our family. We made cotton candy. We FaceTimed with parents and siblings. We had Monopoly spread out on the kitchen table and a puzzle half completed on the dining room table, so we ate delicious, delicious steak and mashed potatoes and Caesar salad on our laps in front of the TV. Fabulous and cozy and wonderful.

What was your favorite (new) TV program?

I did a lot more reading than TV-watching in 2022, which I’m not mad about. My husband and I did watch some TV, though! We really enjoyed the second season of The White Lotus and the most recent season of Stranger Things. We loved Severance – such a creepy, interesting mashup of horror and sci-fi. Bad Sisters was fantastic, riveting television – I can’t believe I haven’t read more about it! We loved Yellowjackets and can’t wait for the next season. We also enjoyed House of the Dragon, despite how horribly violent it is; what can I say, I am a sucker for dragons. I don’t know if I can say that I “loved” The Bear but it was certainly impossible not to watch. Archive 81 was really good until the very ending. We recently started Jack Ryan and are enjoying that so far, too.

By myself, I watched the latest season of Never Have I Ever and continue to absolutely adore that show. I am also re-watching Seinfeld and Schitt’s Creek and still love them both.

With Carla, we started watching Junior Bake Off and Snack vs. Chef, which are fun and light and low-stakes.

To jog my memory, I looked at a bunch of Best Of TV lists, and wow there is so much fabulous TV available that I haven’t watched!

What was the best book you read?

I read 86 books this year, mostly thrillers, and there were so many fabulous books. I think Station Eleven gets top billing for me, though. It was so well-written and so different and so perfectly paced. I just loved it. (I posted all of my top books of 2022 on the book blog.)

What was your favorite film of this year?

As usual, I cannot remember watching any movies this year… I know I was interested in watching the newest Top Gun movie, even though Tom Cruise skeeves me out. But my husband had no interest so I didn’t. He and I planned to watch the Knives Out sequel over the break, but haven’t done that yet. Oh! I watched Spirited, a Christmas Carolian movie starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds and I really enjoyed it despite being very weary of Christmas Carol stories and also really disliking musicals. Carla and I watched Turning Red about a million times, and that was okay. Did we watch anything else?
Anything at all? I have this very strong memory of being in a movie theatre, but cannot for the life of me recall what we saw. Oh well.

Oh right! We went to see the latest iteration of the Jurassic World movies, as a birthday surprise for Carla! It was… okay.

Edited to add: Carla and my husband and I stayed up to watch the ball drop, and while we were waiting we watched two movies. The first was Glass Onion with a star-studded cast. It had some adult themes, that hopefully mostly went over Carla’s head. It was fun and funny and frothy and light (despite being murder-y). Then Carla and I watched the new Matilda musical, which was fabulous. The lead actor was amazing as Matilda, and the casting for Agatha Trunchbull and Jenny Honey was superb. The novel was a favorite of mine when I was a kid and lives large in my head to this day, and the actors chosen to portray these fabulous characters did a wonderful job.

What did you want and get?

We got to go on our family ski trip in March, which was fabulous.

We got to travel to celebrate my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary and see my brother and sister-in-law.

My parents are going to move to my state!! I am so excited that it is finally happening in 2023!

My ceiling is now repaired! (And the repair person is now out of my house, which was an added bonus.)

What did you want and not get?

An agent. A solution to my plantar fasciitis. To visit my childhood home, which I got in a literal sense but not in an emotional sense.

What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Finishing my second manuscript and getting an agent. Pain-free feet. That’s three things, but I’m leaving it.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2022?

I am all about the soft pants, as I have been for the past several years. But I did wear more hard pants than I have since 2019. I think my concept was “feel cute but dress the body I have.” It worked for the most part, although I would really like a pair of jeans whose waistline doesn’t sag throughout the day.

What kept you sane?

Same as last year: My husband. My terrible, wonderful, unputdownable phone. Books and audiobooks. Carbs. Wine. Reading your blog posts. Long walks. Takeout. Writing here.

Who did you miss?

We had such a wonderful family-centric year this year. I felt closer to my family of origin than I have in… decades, maybe? I got to see my parents FOUR TIMES this year, which is unheard of. And I saw my brother and sister-in-law TWICE! Before this year, I hadn’t seen them since 2018! My in-laws visited multiple times, and for reasons of fun rather than reasons of medical treatment which removed a level of worry and stress from their visits. We will continue to see at least my mother-in-law once a quarter. We got to see my sister-in-law and niece twice, which was fabulous. I got to see my childhood best friend for the first time in… five years? Six? So I am delighted and grateful to say that I didn’t do a lot of missing this year. I do, of course, miss the friend I lost in 2019; I will always miss her. I am also missing a friendship that has taken on a new, more distant quality in the past few months.

Who was the best new person you met?

While I didn’t meet anyone new in person (that I can recall, at least), I have met so many wonderful blog friends this year! I wanted to list you all, but it’s funny: I cannot recall how long we’ve known each other. Did we really just meet this year? Or have we been friends all along?

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2022.

Connection, even for (especially for?) an introvert, is so valuable. Sometimes it can be stressful. But it is mood boosting and life sustaining and supportive and necessary. I was so, so fortunate this year to see friends and family more than I had in years. I was so grateful for the connections I built with you, through this blogging community. I was so incredibly lucky to spend so much time alone with my wonderful little family, together and individually. Because I enjoy my solitude, and because I am so socially awkward and anxious, too much togetherness makes me retreat into myself. But there is balance to be had, and the memories and affirmation and intimacy and personal uplift that come from making time for one another – online and in person – are worth the ~~small~~ downsides. I am all too aware just how precious life is, just how fleeting our time together on this planet. I want to remember how simple and gratifying it can be to make the effort to connect.

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

“I love you.” – The Chainsmokers

Happy New Year, dear ones! I adore you and hope 2023 has great things in store for each of us.

July 28, 2022 by suzanne day by day

Staying in Hotels

We stayed in eleven hotels over the course of our Road Trip! and so I feel as though I have some very recent expertise in What Hotels Are Like Lately. (By the way, because my husband is a Credit Card Rewards Black Belt, we stayed in nine of them for FREE.) (Or, as I like to point out, for points, which is not quite the same as free, although my husband vehemently disagrees with me.)

First of all, I want to acknowledge that it is clear the hospitality industry is struggling. The hotels we stayed at ALL seemed to have staffing issues, and I know this is a nationwide problem, and that it is affecting the hotels and the people who do work there much more than it is affecting me. Aside from one receptionist who stalked straight past me and another hotel guest without saying “I’ll be with you in a minute” or even glancing at us, the hotel personnel we encountered were friendly and helpful and doing the absolute BEST they could.

Don’t get me wrong! I am glad hotels exist. I vastly prefer a hotel to, say, staying on the floor of a friend’s house or finding an AirBnB or sleeping in my car or renting an RV. But for all their benefits, they DO have deficits.

It seems to me that the people who design hotel rooms have never once stayed in a hotel room, or perhaps even A Room of any sort. They are all caught up in The Design – which I acknowledge probably helps draw clients – and not caught up enough in The Usability.

I Love Lamp: We had not one but TWO hotel rooms that had a dearth of lamps. In one hotel, we had a two-room suite. There was a bed in each room, with a nightstand near each bed… but only one room/nightstand had a lamp. In the other hotel, there were NO LAMPS AT ALL. Just overhead lighting. Both rooms had overhead lighting, but you had to extinguish the lights from the door, which in both cases was across the room from the bed. While I am aware that furnishing all the rooms in a hotel must be quite pricey, surely a lamp by each bed should have been part of the budget????

*This photo is a LIE. Straight from the hotel website, it features a DESK LAMP which was not present in our hotel! The lack of bed-adjacent lighting is true-to-life though.*

Were You Born in a Barn: Hotels are obsessed with barn doors – OBSESSED. Maybe this is the Magnolia Effect in action (although I didn’t see any shiplap), but I am guessing that hotel designers drool all over themselves at this perfect intersection of Trendy and Space-Saving. The majority of our hotels had barn doors for the bathroom. They are lovely, but the thing is that barn doors are gappy. They do not shut as firmly as regular doors do. Which is something I MISS A LOT when I am sharing a very small space with other people and our collective bathroom needs. (P.S. This little marriage saver has accompanied us in Europe and now across the U.S. and I love it.)

Party of One: Except for our very last hotel, all of our rooms were meant to hold at least two people. They each had two queen beds, and could have fit up to four people. Four! People! But the rooms are very clearly geared toward ONE PERSON, MAYBE TWO. The nightstands were inevitably between the two beds, so that the person on the outer side of the bed had nowhere to put his/her glasses, phone, watch, books, etc. etc. etc. Several of the lamps – which, when they were provided, were on the shared nightstand – were controlled by a single switch, so that both beds had to agree that it was time for lights out. In our last hotel, the one hotel where we had a king bed (and a sofa bed for Carla shudder), my husband’s side of the bed (he always sleeps on the left) had the nightstand and mine had nothing. Worse: His side of the bed had multiple outlets and mine had… nothing. Other nights, when I wasn’t the lucky one to have a nightstand, I was able to at least plug my phone in next to the bed and set it on the headboard or a window sill or something.

This is the most uncomfortable sofa bed known to man. The “mattress” was a thin layer of cloth stretched so tightly over the springs you could see every single spring. We had to put the couch cushions on top of the “mattress” and then put the sheets over the cushions.

Carry In, Carry Out: Hotel rooms have the smallest trash cans I have ever seen. At one hotel, the single trash can was divided into two identical sections – one for trash, one for recycling. The recycling side fit a single plastic water bottle.

No Sleep Til Brooklyn: If you want to control your room’s temperature, you will not sleep. Not one wink. Because the air conditioner/heating unit will roar on at unexpected intervals all night long, clattering and moaning and blasting out air that is at least ten degrees hotter/more frigid than you anticipated until you give up and turn it off and succumb to the ambient air temperature.

Form Over Function: One of our hotels had a beautiful armoire with an interior light that turned on when you opened the doors and a fancy teapot and a mini Nespresso machine. It had neither a refrigerator nor an extra roll of toilet paper. One of our hotels had a gorgeous little coffee station with three pouches of local coffee but it was the hotel with ZERO LAMPS. I would rather have lamps than local coffee. (Side note: the place without the extra toilet paper was also the place with the miniature garbage can. I called down to housekeeping, requesting more toilet paper and a garbage bag. The kind housekeeper showed up with two garbage bags, one mini-sized to fit the trash can, one an enormous lawn-and-leaf sized bag. I took the latter, thanked her, and shut the door… only to realize that I perhaps should have reassured her that nothing horrifying had happened to necessitate my odd combination of requests.)

And the SHOWERS. This should technically be part of the previous bullet, but it drives me bonkers enough that it deserves its own. So many showers now have the rainfall shower heads. You know – the ones that stand directly above you and drench you? I cannot STAND those stupid shower heads. You can’t get away from the water! If I want to apply shampoo to my head or face wash to my cheeks, I have to step completely out of the line of ~~fire~~ water and freeze my tuchus completely off to do so. I much prefer the standard shower head. MUCH. Also, hotel shower designers have never taken a shower before. They do not understand that most people need various accessories to help them get clean: soap, shampoo, conditioner. Maybe a razor. Maybe face wash. Maybe body wash. But no. If you shower in a hotel, you are lucky to get one tiny triangular shelf that can barely accommodate a bar of soap and one of the eensy hotel-supplied bottles of shampoo. Unless I am in a hotel that has a bathtub/shower combo, I never know how I’m supposed to shave my legs. My own at-home shower has a little ledge upon which I can rest my foot. But when I’m in a hotel, I have to balance precariously on one foot while I shave the other leg or try to prop it up against the questionably-clean shower wall or bend over and get a mouthful of water while trying to shave. Further proof that hotel designers do not shower: We had one hotel with a BEAUTIFUL shower – fancy stone tiles, rainfall shower head, glass door. Except that there was no door – just a glass panel that went half the length of the shower and then a door-sized open space through which all the cold air of the room could sneak in and shower with you. Perhaps marginally better than the hotels with shower curtains that billow into the shower while you’re washing your hair and play grabby-handsy with your upper thighs, but not by much.

*Rainfall shower head AND a half-panel of glass AND a barn door. The trifecta, achieved!*

Other things I have noticed: Almost without exception, housekeeping services are on-demand now – if you stay multiple days and want your trash emptied or your linens changed, you need to call ahead (sometimes up to 24 hours in advance, according to in-elevator signage), whereas this was a daily service in previous years. (I never used to take people up on it – I don’t want housekeepers having to make my bed or tidy things up around my suitcases and toothbrush.) Shampoos and conditioners are TINY now, or that they come in big canisters that are permanently attached inside the showers. Probably an environmentally advantageous move, honestly. Shower caps, much to my enduring dismay, are no longer offered alongside your miniature shampoos and bars of soap.

On the not-complaining-or-mocking side of things, the people at the hotels were ALL so nice to Carla. So nice. She loved to march up to the desk when we arrived and say, “We’re checking in” as much as she loved handing over the keys at the end of our stays and saying brightly, “We’re checking out.” The hotel staff invariably found her super charming. One receptionist asked me if he could give her a piece of candy and then allowed her to choose anything she wanted from the hotel snack pantry. Another person acted, with an entirely straight face, like Carla was the person who’d booked and paid for the room, and he asked her very seriously whether she’d enjoyed her stay, and then answered her multiple questions about the hotel (it was in an historic building) with such kindness that I was unable to bring myself to tell him that there had been NO LAMPS in the hotel room. I think it would be so easy, working in a hotel, to be bored or harried or both, but everyone (except for that one woman I mentioned above) was so kind. So kind.

July 25, 2022 by suzanne day by day

Road Trip! Round Up

Okay, so now that I am feeling better, I am going to tell you about our Road Trip! It was truly a wonderful experience, except right there at the end. I do wish I could back in time and urge my family to WEAR MASKS even though we would be the only! people! doing so! but I cannot.

*We drove through so much beautiful landscape.*

The best thing about the trip, by far, was spending so much time with my husband. He was so relaxed and cheerful and fun – all the things I love about him. All the things that the stress of his work chips away at on a normal basis.

*Madison, WI. Such a charming city. It’s very walkable with lots of cute restaurants and shops.*

We had planned to take turns driving – we had six consecutive days of five- to seven-hour drives there, and five consecutive days of pretty-close-to-seven-hour drives on the way back. That’s a lot of driving for one person. And I DID drive. But my husband admitted that he spent the entire two hours I was in the driver’s seat staring at the speedometer, willing it to rise to the level HE is comfortable going. And we had multiple tense conversations where I expressed fear at passing someone and he would say that I should only pass when I was comfortable! and neither of us enjoyed that. So! From then on, he did nearly all of the remainder of the driving.

*Yes, we stopped to take a photo with the Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, MN*

We used pretty much every single thing I told you I bought in this post, and a few of the things that I was considering at the time and ended up buying. PLUS we also bought a fidget snake that mbmom11 recommended. Used and LOVED, I should say. The only thing that went unopened was the game of Loaded Questions, which my husband put into his backpack and then wouldn’t allow us to remove. So none of us even knows if we would have liked it.

*Sioux Falls. Also very walkable, and the Falls were lovely.*

The one thing that I wished we had but didn’t was a travel laundry bag. We kept stuffing our dirty clothes into random shopping bags or those dry-cleaning bags that hotels clip to the hangers in the closet, and the bags filled up more quickly than I would have thought and the handles kept breaking and it would have been very nice to have a dedicated bag for it. (I am really weird about NOT mixing dirty clothes with clean clothes, so I recognize this wouldn’t be at the top of everyone’s list.) We were able to wash laundry at my parents’ house, for which I am VERY grateful.

The Badlands National Park in South Dakota was spectacular, although we didn’t see any wild animals. We did see a lot of idiot tourists going off the well-maintained paths and climbing onto precarious perches to take photos for the ‘Gram, though.

Carla loved the road trip journal and the travel atlas. I’d say that she loved the atlas a little more than the journal – it seemed to have more easy breezy activities and fewer essay assignments. If I were a better planner, I would have allowed Carla to open the journal a day or so in advance of our trip, and talk it through with her. But oh well.

*The Dignity statue on the Crow Creek Reservation was breathtaking.*

Even though we didn’t play Loaded Questions, we did try to find license plates from all 50 states. My husband made the rule early on that semi-trucks do NOT count, which made it really tough. (One of the last states we got was Maine, and SO MANY trucks seemed to be from Maine!) In the end, the only two states we didn’t get were Delaware and Hawaii.

*Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse were SO worth seeing.*

We DID get a cooler and we did USE the cooler, but only because we had it, not because we really needed it. In fact, for the first few days we didn’t use it at all and I kept asking my husband WHY we’d bought it. On the way home, though, we stopped at a little bakery and got some cute little cakes and put those in the cooler for two days before we had a chance to eat them, so it did come in handy in the end.

*Deadwood was fun to see. We spent about an hour there, and caught one of the free re-enactments they offer. It was exactly the right amount of time to spend there.*

Speaking of food: I didn’t try to stick to the keto diet. Not even a little. (Note: It would have been fairly easy to do so if I had wanted to, I think. Most of the gas stations had Quest products and Whisps and little packages of meat-and-cheese and sometimes even Keto cookies. The reason I didn’t try was that I didn’t WANT to.) (Also, I weighed myself when I got home and I weighed EXACTLY THE SAME as I had when we left, which was highly disheartening.) I found that I often opted for the little veggie snacks when we stopped at gas stations – I ate carrots and ranch as well as a little tray of carrots, celery, and spinach dip with great gusto. But I also ate lots of chips. I unintentionally went on a Ruffles kick and tried several of their new (or new-to-me) flavors: Spicy Dill Pickle, Lime & Jalapeno, Flamin’ Hot BBQ. I don’t know that I LIKED any of them, but nary a chip crumb was left in any of the bags, so… I didn’t NOT like them. I drank a LOT of Diet Mountain Dew. One day, on a whim, I got a bottle of regular, full-sugar Squirt which was MUCH too sugary and only tasted of childhood for the first few sips. Yuck. I ate at my all-time favorite fast food place THREE times (I get a large potato oles with a side of nacho cheese, and I ask for a second little empty nacho-cheese cup to fill with hot sauce, and then I dip the oles into the hot sauce and then the nacho cheese. HEAVEN.) and ate fries from multiple McDonald’ses and Arby’ses. I would be okay if I never see a Subway Spicy Italian sandwich again. My husband found THREE Super Mega Candy Stores on our route, and he and my daughter had so much fun ogling all the candy and choosing what they wanted to buy. I forced Carla to eat some lettuce one night and tried to get tomatoes and fruit into her at least a few times, but mostly she subsisted on chicken nuggets and fries for two straight weeks. Her favorite gas station food stuff (besides morrrrrrrre candddyyyyyyy) was Babybel cheese. Oh! The Trader Joe’s popcorn I got before our trip was… not my favorite. No one really loved it, sadly. And I had bought a second bag in a fit of panic about not having enough if it turned out to be the best thing ever. Oh well. Fun to try.

*Devil’s Tower in Wyoming was nothing short of a geological marvel. Stunning and bizarre and totally cool. The little walk around its perimeter was a great way to stretch our legs, too.*

We also ate at a LOT of restaurants. More than we have eaten in over the past two-ish years combined, I think. Part of my husband’s in-depth planning for this trip involved researching fun places to eat, and it paid off. We went to a lot of breweries. I really grew accustomed to my nightly pint of local craft beer, to be honest. By the end of our trip, I was DESPERATE for something other than brewery food. I love burgers and fish and chips and salad with grilled salmon and whatever else you get at every brewery across the country, but I started craving enchiladas smothered in hot sauce or chicken vindaloo with a side of chana masala or red curry with shrimp or Brazilian braised pork with avocado crema. FLAVOR that is not Grilled or Fried. We went out for a LOT of breakfasts. I don’t LIKE breakfast, so I got tired of that in about the time it takes to scramble an egg. The last place we went to was not my kind of place – cramped, order at the counter, bus your own table. The silverware was in big canisters in the little cramped space between the tables and kitchen, and several of the forks I pulled out had crusted food baked into them. The mug they served my husband’s coffee in had multiple chips around the rim. My husband thought it was CHARMING and had CHARACTER but I hated it and I hated my artisan avocado toast and I was kind of a brat. But it was just the one bratty morning, and I think I pulled myself out of it okay, so I am going to give myself an overall rating of Good Breakfast Sport.

These were the ONLY wildlife we saw, and they weren’t even “wild,” because they were hanging out behind a fence with some longhorn cattle. Well, I did see a mountain goat on the side of the road, chewing some grass. But I didn’t get a photo and no one else saw it so it doesn’t really count. Oh, and we saw a ton of antelope, so many that the novelty wore off and they seemed as unexciting as cows.

We listened to two books on the drive. When Carla was watching her iPad or listening to her own collection of audiobooks (I think she was re-listening to Socks and to the Gooney Bird Greene series, both downloaded from our local library), my husband and I listened to There, There by Tommy Orange. It was, overall, a compelling and eye-opening read/listen. The audiobook was well done, with a multi-reader cast to help differentiate between the multiple narrators. But the subject matter was so very dark and sad. And there was SO MUCH cursing, which I don’t love but don’t normally mind too much – but it made me uncomfortable with Carla right there. Not that she doesn’t know most of the curse words. Not that a few overheard curse words can hurt her in any way. We FINISHED the entire book, which felt like quite an accomplishment. When Carla was taking an iPad break, we listened to the fifth Harry Potter. I wish we had listened to more of it; I don’t think we even made it halfway through. We listened to a lot less music than I thought we would. Mainly, I think, because we were so often in areas with no cell service, so our music choices were limited to a downloaded playlist on my husband’s phone. It’s a good playlist, but he’s heard it a million times, and honestly there’s only so much Drake I can deal with. Next time, I will suggest making a playlist in advance of the trip.

*Ah, the prairie. Makes my heart sing, but I am only posting one photo of sagebrush and endless plains for your viewing pleasure. If you want more, I have MANY.*

And there WILL be a next time. It went so well that we all agreed we want to do it again. We may not go on the road for two weeks straight again (just taking the time off is tricky for my husband), but we definitely are no longer fearful of lengthy, multi-day car trips. Maybe we’ll go to Canada, next time.

The best days – even those that included the most time in the car – were those where we woke up early and were on the road between 7:00 and 8:00 am. That way, we could get to our day’s destination before dinner, even if we ended up stopping a couple of times along the way. I also found it most useful when we could walk around for a bit before or after dinner. Despite being in the car for up to seven hours a day, I still managed to get in 10,000+ steps most days.

My favorite state to drive through was Wyoming. I’d only ever been to Jackson Hole before, and that was in the winter. Well, wait – I did go to Yellowstone some years ago; but I can’t remember if that was the Wyoming part or the Montana part. I think Montana. Anyway: the geology of Wyoming is stunning, and so changeable. We would be driving through plains, and then suddenly mountains would loom up around us. And then we were in a canyon surrounded by jagged rocks. And then rolling badlands. And then plains again. The Wind River Canyon was spectacular – everywhere a breathtaking view. Plus, the highways were fast and crowd-free.

*We went to the Cody Nite Rodeo, which was a lot of fun.*

*None of our photos of Wind River Canyon do its staggering beauty justice. We kept pulling off the road to take photos, it was so gorgeous.*

We went to a rodeo. We saw Mount Rushmore. We bathed in hot springs. We fished. We spent a LOT of quality time together. I got to see my best-friend-since-sixth-grade and my brother and my niece and BOTH sisters-in-law and my parents.

*We stopped in Des Moines for lunch. It was cute.*

We covered nearly 4,900 miles. My poor car announced that it was due for maintenance somewhere along our journey home, and I understand exactly how it feels. But it was truly a wonderful, beautiful experience.