Utah Day 1: from home to Omaha, NE

We’re off on another Travels-with-Claudia adventure. This one started when we saw a program on PBS, National Parks Symphony: The Mighty Five. The Utah Symphony Orchestra plays gorgeous music with visuals entirely scenery of the major national parks in the state. As we sat on the couch, I could hear Mom gasp at the beauty. When it was done, I turned to her. “So do you want to go?” When you are almost 93, you don’t say, “Yeah, sometime we should do that.” 

Steve pulled out his calendar, and we set the dates. He wrote the Utah tourism department and got brochures and a suggested route. The plan is two nights in each place so we have a travel day and then an explore day. Travel days will have plenty of time for exploring also since we won’t have to go more than a couple hours. The negative is that it takes two FULL days to get there and two full days home again.

We were out the door at 8 this morning in such a hurry that we left two water bottles in the fridge and all the crackers I had packed. We went through Cambridge to pick up Mom’s mail (and some Danish at Herman’s Bakery). Stopped at the P.O. to mail a couple things and Cub to replace the crackers, and headed south on I-35.

Although Mom usually rides in the front seat, we put her in the back for these long days of driving so she can elevate her feet on the cooler. She'll be back in front when we get to Utah.

We had lunch in the car and listened to Louise Penny The Brutal Telling audiobook. I did a lot of knitting. I also downloaded a new license plate game app since my old one needs updating to work with the current system. Plates Free shows a map with the states we have found in red so we can see our progress (20 states so far) and honks when you click a new state. It also has vanity license plate puzzles for each state. The only negative is that when I click that we saw a new state plate, it turns off the audio book. Go figure.

Supper was Cracker Barrel in Lincoln, NE, and we are now settled for rest in a USA Inn outside Omaha. Tomorrow will be more of the same although by mid Colorado, I don’t expect to be doing much knitting.