Belated Honeymoon

Tiffany and I went on our belated honeymoon a few weeks ago and it was terrific! With our initial plans of going to Mexico being canceled due to the Swine Flu "H1N1" Virus, we decided to checkout a place both of us have never been, Montana! The weather was beautiful and the scenery was fantastic.


The trip started out with a bit of embarassment. When checking our luggage, the Southwest employee asked us several times why we were going to Spokane and we finally told her that it was our belated honeymoon. She congratulated us and told us she would try to have champagne ready for us on the flight. We laughed and told her that would be great expecting nothing of it. Later as we were standing in line to board the plane, the ramp agent made an announcement over the loudspeaker, "folks we have some very special passengers riding with us today, would Mr. and Mrs. Finnegan please come on down to the gate please!" We both don't like the spotlight, but we weren't going to go unnoticed so we went ahead and walked down to the agent. She let us board the flight early, red faces and all. Once onboard, the flight attendant asked for us over the loudspeaker and proceeded down the aisle with a bottle of Champagne! It was a very nice gesture from Southwest and a great way to start the trip.



After landing in Spokane, we picked up our rental car and met up with Tiffany's cousin and husband, Bri and Max. Max is active duty Air Force and stationed nearby. They hosted us for the night and we headed out on our 5 hour drive to Glacier National Park. At Glacier, we went white water rafting, horseback riding, and even skydiving. Skydiving was a blast, but we both agreed that we wouldn't be doing a tandem jump again anytime soon. The week flew by and we were on our way back to Virginia. I gave my two weeks notice a short two weeeks after our trip and now we are headed back up to DC to start our new jobs. We both are both very excited. We'll be subleasing for the next month or so until we can move back into the condo. Hopefully, over the next year, we will be able to make it back out to the west coast, especially now that I have a job where you get a reasonable amount of vacation days. Check out the photos on Picasa. There are about 4 albums so after clicking on the link you can go back to the albums page and check out the others. A big thanks to Don and Judy for the timeshare and to Richard and Ellen for helping with flights!

Glacier National Park

Road trip!

We just got back from our summer road trip from Phoenix, AZ to Houston, TX. 99% of the time we were on secondary roads so we got to see small towns and a variety of scenery you don't get from I-10 or I-40. The shear vastness of the Southwest is humbling. We had cell phones with patchy service and a laptop computer that didn't come out of its case the whole trip. Although it was just a long weekend, it was kind of liberating to be a bit out of touch for a bit.

Phoenix
Cleaning out the storage unit in Phoenix turned out to be easier than anticipated. George was there to help get some stuff organized and shuffled around. We shipped some stuff, hit Salvation Army a couple of times, and crammed the rest into the car. Friday around 3 p.m. after a fun-filled session at the DMV to get the car registered we were heading N.E. out of PHX.

Show Low, AZ
Our first stop was Show Low, Arizona. The weather was cool (anything is cooler than the valley anyway) and the people were friendly. I got a big kick out of the morning rush heading out of town. Real cowboys herding their flock of sheep across I-60 delayed our exit Sat a.m., much to my delight. All in a day's work for them, but it was like something out of the movies for city-folk like us.


Socorro, NM

We had an abrupt, unplanned stop about half way between Magdelena and Socorro when the left rear tire blew out. The biggest pain was emptying the truck to get to the spare. Richard handled it in short time. And although there's very little traffic on that road, the people that did come by all stopped to offer help.

Shortly after that, we went by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory NRAO site http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/ I didn't know what the heck all this equipment was at the time, but suspected it had something to do with the aliens that are known to frequent the area; after all, we were only 3 hours out of Roswell!!

Roswell, NM
Yeah! We arrived in Roswell with one hour to spare before the Discount Tire placed closed for the weekend. Four new tires made me much more confident about facing the entirety of Texas the following day. The International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell was pretty much everything I had expected. It reminded me of my pilgrimage to Graceland about the better part of 20 years ago. They 'curator' told us they get about 165,000 visitors a year, which is nothing to scoff at considering it is located in the S.W. corner of New Mexico pretty far off the beaten track.

Lubbock to Houston, TX
We left Roswell on Sunday morning with the intent on getting at least as far as Austin. Seeing the landscape filled with oil rigs and cotton fields was no surprise, but we didn't expect to run into one enormous wind farm that seemed to run from Sweetwater all the way to Abilene. These giant white turbines were a thing of beauty set against a clear blue sky. Based on the articles I've read, Texas ranks #1 in Wind energy in the U.S. This wind project is the epitome of how they do things in Texas.
Big. Really Big!
http://www.seco.cpa.state.tx.us/re_wind.htm

R&R in the Houston area
It was great to get into Houston and see Doug again. After spending a few long days in the car, it was nice to go walking at Buffalo Bayou. http://www.buffalobayou.org/
The next day we took a trip down to Galveston. There was a lot of damage but a lot of rebuilding going on. Walking around on the Strand, the high water water was well over six feet. Many of these buildings had survived the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and were being renovated once again in the aftermath of Ike.

Wednesday morning we were flying home, leaving the car with Doug. In the fall we'll be back to visit Doug and a few more friends in Houston and then resume our road trip. Next stop - Florida.















Here's links to a complete set of photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/closethedistance/Roswell?feat=directlink

http://picasaweb.google.com/closethedistance/PHXHOU2009?feat=directlink