Rollin Down the Highway...

Man, it’s been a while. Well, where to begin... At the beginning, I suppose? December 23rd was Lauren's and my last day at work. I had an idea that we would be a little busy between then and leaving for CO, but I didn't really anticipate everything we had to do! It was a crazy couple of weeks of Christmas celebrations, trying to see everyone before we left, and packing. So much packing. It’s hard to believe all of the stuff we owned. You can really get an inventory on your life by packing up everything you own and putting it in a storage unit—especially an inventory of all that crap you own that you really have no reason to. We gave away, donated, recycled, and threw away an absolutely obscene amount of stuff.

So anyway, now that we’ve got all the hard work out of the way, the apartment keys turned in, and the storage unit locked up, we’re finally free! I’m writing this right now in the lobby of a Marriott hotel in Salt Lake City (gotta love free hotel stays from credit card deals). We got here in a pretty roundabout way. We left KC on Jan. 3 for Cuchara, CO. We spent just a few days out there of organization and being out of breath (9,000 ft. elevation will do that to us flatlanders) before heading off on the first of our road trips, primarily to see our Camino Mom and Camino Dad, Tracy and Dean in Salt Lake City!

But being as we don’t have any schedule to keep these days, we just decided to stop in on Moab on our way out here to check out the Arches National Park. And damn it was COLD. We woke up to -14 F yesterday morning. It was so cold that my fingers started aching after being outside about 3 minutes without gloves and my hair had frozen into a stiff sheet. It warmed up to a balmy 12 F by the time we hit the Delicate Arch (that famous one thats on all the signs and license plates in Utah, you know, the big orange one).

Arches was completely awesome, even though every massive sandstone boulder we had to walk up was covered in a sheet of ice. I nearly had an epic wipe out on the way down. We also had a pretty epic arch fail on the way up. We took a wrong turn on the trail, and instead of coming at the arch from the front like you’re supposed to do, we walked up to it from the side. I didn’t realize we were actually looking at the arch until we walked up to the base of it. I thought it was just another random rock spire sticking up. Arch fail. We eventually made our way around to the side you can actually see it from and it was completely worth it.

But now we’re out of the barrens, and into the big city for the week. And you know what that means…time to do some work! Researching Utah breweries, that is…