Greetings from the highways of America!

Last Thursday, Brian & I set out for the first leg of our trip (Iowa) to visit my parents, grandmother and watch the Iowa Hawkeyes win their Homecoming game against Purdue (which they did! It was Brian's first live football game and I think he's finally realized I really do love football!)

We spent our first night at the Gaslight Campground somewhere near the Ohio/Pennsylvania border. It was uneventful and rather short. It was the first time we saw the cats since starting our journey--Lily sits under my chair and Bastet sits under the couch while we travel, only coming out when the RV is parked.

Friday night we slept in the RV in the parking lot of the Heartland Inn in Cedar Rapids, IA (my parents were staying in the hotel--we offered to let them stay in the RV with us, but they surprisingly weren't too excited about the idea!)

Saturday was the game--it turned out to be a beautiful fall day and a great game (thankfully, Iowa didn't give it away in the 4th quarter, despite trying!) It was pretty exciting right at the end when one of the freshman intercepted the ball on the 2 yard line and ran it all the way back for a touchdown, setting a new U of I record--college football doesn't get much better than that!




Sunday was my Grandma Rachel's 91st birthday. We celebrated with her by having Godfather's taco pizza (this is our favorite pizza outside of New York, by the way) and birthday cake. She's a pretty amazing little lady--at 91 she still drives (though Mom has convinced her maybe that's not such a good idea and she's getting rid of her car now--it's a little scary when all you see coming at you is this giant blue car and a puff of white hair up over the steering wheel!)

On Monday, however, our trip took a minor setback when Brian had to fly back to New York to tie up some loose ends at work. I stayed in Iowa with the cats and my parents. I really enjoyed my time with them--my dad had Monday off so we spent the day together and saw a great movie on Monday night (Facing the Giants) which I'll tell you about in another post--it deserves an entire post to itself (but go see it if you have the chance)

I've pretty much spent the week doing mundane errands (the RV is getting fixed--we ran out of time in NJ to get it all finished before we left) and repacking. Yes, repacking. About 2 weeks ago, I went to a jewelry making class and when I came home Brian had opened up all the suitcases, unzipped all of our shrink bags and pulled random things out of the suitcase stating "We don't need this" (note: "we" meant me--they were all my clothes!)

Once I got over my extreme anger and frustration, I told him I would be willin to go through everything and take some things out--but next time ask first! (I had spent the 3 previous days folding & packing our entire lives ALL day long.) So now, I have everything repacked (I didn't have enough time to unpack, go through and repack before we left NY) and I am rather impressed with myself. Not only do I have weight restrictions for luggage (as one would expect when flying) we also have luggage size to worry about.

Today, we start the next leg of our trip--the South. We'll be headed to Tulsa, OK this afternoon and onto Lubbock, TX tomorrow to visit Brian's sister, Jenny, and her husband, Tory. Brian's brother, Mark, is flying in from Bozeman, MT to spend the weekend with us as well and he'll travel with us from Lubbock back to Denver in the RV.

So that's where we are for now. Sorry, no exciting travel stories yet. The only interesting thing we've seen so far is the "Live Fish" truck (a flat bed semi with 4 giant fish tanks). Maybe after this weekend we'll have more!

Have a great day!