Amazing Sights from the Road

Yesterday my husband and I--"Papa" and "Gra Gra," that is--had to say good-bye to our darling little granddaughters and their mom and dad, which was very difficult and sad.  The week we spent with them just flew by, and it was wonderful.

We drove for about 13 hours, from Colorado Springs to Iowa City, where we stopped for the night.  Just after we got on the road in Colorado, we saw a sight I'd never seen before in my life--except in cowboy movies.  As we were driving along, we hit a patch of highway where there were a bunch of large tumbleweeds sweeping across the road.  Before this trip, I really thought tumbleweeds were little more than movie props.  In westerns, they always seem to be tumbling down the dusty main street of the little prairie town when the bad guy and the sheriff face off at either end for a gun duel.  This was the only context in which I'd ever seen them, so how could they be real?  Well, they are real.  And yesterday I saw some.  I didn't get a picture of them, but believe me, I saw some.  And Black Bart wasn't anywhere in sight.

Hours after the tumbleweed sighting, my husband and I pulled off at a huge, somewhat unbelievable truck stop in Nebraska (complete with a shower area for the truckers, restaurants, stores, and even a chapel for Sunday services!), and I saw another amazing sight.  It was something I didn't even think existed anymore.

Remember these?  They're called phone booths.  I thought pay phones were obsolete, because they're not small enough to carry in your pocket and you can't check the Internet with them; but apparently, I was wrong.  And there wasn't just one of these dinosaurs; there was a whole hallway of them, each with its own vintage coin-operated pay phone and a little stool to sit upon.

It was kind of nice to see that pay phones and phone booths are not yet extinct in the good old US of A.

And speaking of dinosaurs, here's another incredible sight from the road yesterday.

That T-Rex looks almost real, doesn't it?  I only wish we'd passed this guy on one of our many car trips with our boys when they were little.  Heck, I wish they'd been with us yesterday.  They're all in their 20's now, except our baby (who will turn 20 in January), and they're still crazy about dinosaurs.

So I learned a few things yesterday.  Tumbleweeds are real.  And driving through Nebraska is like going through a time machine, where phone booths and dinosaurs are not yet extinct.

Today, we make a pit stop in South Bend, IN to have lunch with our baby at Notre Dame, and then we push on to Erie, PA.