Road Trip!

As most of you probably know, last week was pretty wild for us. We had interviews at two medical schools. The schools were within four hours of each other, but halfway across the country from us. We were fortunate enough to get the interviews scheduled on consecutive days, which saved us mega travel bucks. (I’ll talk more about medical school and our status there in another blog.) It also made it a tough decision about how to travel there, as flying was fairly expensive and I would have had to rent a car. Driving was pretty expensive, too, but Christina could come at no extra charge. In the end, there was probably little difference in cost, but we were able to make it a vacation of sorts (albeit a very fast and furious one) and have some good quality time together.

We left Blanding Tuesday afternoon and trekked the first four and a half hours to Glenwood Springs, Colorado. This is the town right at the bottom of that really cool stretch of I-70 through Glenwood Pass, where both directions of the freeway are essentially stacked on top of each other as the interstate winds through a very narrow, deep and rugged canyon. Glenwood Springs itself is divided into two very distinct halves. The Colorado River and the interstate run directly through the city. This may make for a scenic city, but for us, it just made horribly frustrated as we tried to navigate across one of the two (maybe three?) places you can cross from one side of the city to the other.

We woke early Wednesday morning to snow on the car and covering the parking lot. As we headed out, the weather looked quite imposing, but soon broke back into blue skies. Unfortunately, that was short lived, and soon we were back into the snow. Only now we were also trying to climb over the Rocky Mountains, too. We had a slow, scary drive up the series of passes with two to three inches of snow and more falling. Once we topped out and passed through Johnson Tunnel, though, the weather actually broke for good and we enjoyed dry roads through the rest of Colorado and all the way across Nebraska.

We arrived in Iowa and then into Des Moines Wednesday night and found our hotel after a short detour all the way around the city… and back again. I interviewed at Des Moines University in the morning and into the afternoon. I was a little frustrated and very tired when Christina picked me up, and definitely ready to drive straight to the hotel where I could sit and watch a basketball game, but she had other ideas.

I reassumed the driver’s seat and Christina returned to navigation duties as she had been assigned. We headed south out of Des Moines and Christina began to give directions. I began to notice something didn’t quite seem right when we turned onto a little tiny two-lane highway toward a town called Fort Madison. I still didn’t think much of it until Christina became very frustrated because she couldn’t find the bridge. You know, the one that crossed the Mississippi River. I was pretty sure it wasn’t necessary to cross the Mississippi River to get from Iowa to Missouri. We found the bridge soon enough, crossed the giant river and continued straight into Nauvoo, Illinois. We had a good time looking at the temple and several of the other historic sites nearby. As darkness fell, we made one final stop at the gravesite of the Prophet Joseph Smith, taking in the significance for a moment before climbing back into the car to wind our way along the river and finally into Missouri.

The road from Nauvoo to Kirksville, Missouri, was about as much of a highway as the road into Fort Madison. We seemed to go up and down and around innumerable hills and crossed four rickety looking one-lane bridges. It was interesting, though, that we passed right through Memphis, Missouri, while we were listening to Missouri play Memphis in the NCAA basketball tournament.

The next day we visited the campus of Kirksville College of Medicine. Christina was invited to attend the day and she enjoyed it, even the visit to the anatomy lab with a dissection in progress. After the interview, we climbed back into the car and headed toward the dark skies over Kansas City.

We stopped for the night in Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the University of Kansas Jayhawks, who were playing in the Sweet Sixteen against Michigan State. Overall, that had little effect on us except the nostalgia of being there. We did go out to dinner and found the restaurant parking lot packed to the gills. Cars were everywhere imaginable. We ended up parking in the lot of a nearby department store and walking to the restaurant. We expected it to be packed as well, but it wasn’t. In fact, there were only about four people in the restaurant. Turns out the restaurant shared its parking lot with a couple of sports bars. The bars, of course, were packed. So much so that people were gathered around the doors which had been propped open. Mind you, it was windy, rainy and freezing. Freezing. Literally. The rain would freeze pretty much as soon as it hit the ground, if not sooner.

The freezing rain was the front edge of a storm the walloped Denver and was predicted to bring around 12 inches of snow to Kansas City. Needless to say, it had us nervous. Fortunately, the heart of the storm swirled down below I-70 and we snuck out of Lawrence early Saturday morning hoping to get past the worst of it. While we probably did manage to get around the worst of it, we didn’t miss it. We spent around three hours driving through snowy conditions on top of a freeway that could as well have been an ice skating rink. During that long three hours, I don’t think we ever drove more than 40 mph, and were probably less than that for the majority of the time. We figure it put us behind our schedule by at least two hours, possibly more. It also made it seem like Kansas went on forever. And ever. And ever.

We spent another night in another hotel in Denver, and I watched my March Madness bracket go down in flames when Villanova beat Pitt at the buzzer.

On Sunday, we finished the journey, listening to last fall’s General Conference to make up for missing church. It was rather uneventful outside of a section of freeway near Crescent Junction, Utah, where the wind blew wild. We laughed as we dodged tumbleweeds that crossed the highway like overzealous herds of sheep, only we didn’t always miss. The first one we hit exploded like a water balloon, shooting dried reeds over the top of the car. The dust was so thick in places, we couldn’t see oncoming cars, which was an adventure in itself.

Through all that happened, we never doubted the hand of God in our travels. We faced off with some tough weather, but were spared the catastrophic weather thousands others faced during the weekend. The car ran like a champ, our gas mileage was respectable and we were never in a situation beyond that which we felt we could handle.

What a world we live in now. Just think, we made the journey from Nauvoo to Utah in three days. Three fairly easy days. And though we passed through some rough weather, we were never in danger of frost bite, starvation or freezing to death. It is amazing how much we can take for granted. I am thankful for the blessings we have, but also for the example set by the pioneers. Incredible.