Trip to Phoenix

Last Wednesday I flew out to Phoenix to then drive back with Jamie. The theme of the trip was delays. My flight was delayed 2 hours out there and I'll write more about the other delays later. When I finally got there, we had to get one last meal from In-n-Out Burgers. Oh, they are so yummy!

Thursday was Jamie's last day at work. While she was at work, I helped pack up her things. She had so much stuff! :) I went and picked her up from work and was there as she said her last good-byes. Jamie was good to stay composed, so I shed a few tears for her! It was neat to see how loved she is.

We then had to go to Oregano's for dinner. Every time I have come to Phoenix, we have eaten here. And every time we have gotten the same thing. Fabulous!

We then had the daunting task of loading her car. We stuffed all kinds of things in every crack we could find! Plus it was really windy the whole day (comparable to Oklahoma's windiest day) and made it difficult. Jamie says I brought the wind with me. There wasn't room for my stuff, so I kept both of my bags in the front with me...comfortable!

We knew there was a snow storm expected in the area we would drive through. The predictions kept getting worse, and my parents even thought we should have left Thursday night instead of Friday morning. But that wasn't possible. So we just decided to leave earlier at that morning. Here we are ready to go! (Notice the bag on top of my lap and the bag under?! We did eventually find a place to stuff the little things in my lap.)

The drive started out nice. Her generous friends had given her tons of cookies so we pretty much ate. We joked about our diet being chips, cookies, and candy. I have never craved fruit or exercise more!

Seven hours later we made it to Albuquerque. We stopped to get gas and asked about the road conditions ahead. We got all kinds of stories how I-40 was closed from just a few miles away to the next big town an hour and a half away. We did finally confirm that it was closed at the next town. We decided to go ahead and get a hotel room not wanting to risk not finding one once we got to the town where the highway was closed. (This was all too familiar since two years ago, our family got stuck here for 3 days due to I-40 being closed.) Thanks to our great parents for finding us a hotel without us having to drive around searching. So it was 3:00 and we were stuck in a hotel room watching Oprah wishing that we were on our way home. We had fun, making the most of it, but frustrated that we were stranded.

The next morning was a long one waiting to hear word that the interstate was open. Finally at noon they were reopened. We were thrilled to leave. When we checked out, the lady at the front desk warned us that she heard it was backed up quite a bit. We didn't care...we could go! Until we ran into this:

We were stopped. No rolling, nothing, stopped. For an hour and a half. Not cool! This was at first when we were still smiling.Everyone turned off their cars and so it was like we were sitting in a parking lot. We finally got moving! We went a few miles, and then we were stopped again! I fell asleep and woke up to find the driver asleep too! The other problem is that there are no radio stations. We had no idea where Jamie's Ipod was and so there was a lot of silence! Jamie sang, we even wrote a song! I started reading the second book of Twilight and ended up reading it out loud to her. We finally got moving at regular speed. We made it home 11:30 that night. Only 24 hours later than we were supposed to! The silver lining was that it was good time spent with Jamie before she heads to Africa.