Saint Anne the Wife and I were able to dump our two house fires with their grandparents a few days last week and head west. The twenty-seven hundred mile road trip through eight states was all kinds of good for the soul. Did I mention we bought a car like two days after getting back to Oklahoma City?
Over the years work has had me through most of the US, but several of the states on this trip were a first for Anne. We made a big loop through Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and back through Oklahoma. The whole "global pandemic" thing is still raging and we did our best to avoid anyone else.
Turns out there's a whole lot of nothing out west still. Rocks, lots of rocks. And lots of wide open space with a healthy seasoning of mountain to taste. You'd pass a city now and then but it was only there because all the wide open space didn't want to come across as too greedy.
Anne honestly hasn't had much of a break from the boys since we'd moved to New York in December 2018. I was hustling and trying to do the thing and she ran the house like the hero she is. No question she's the glue that kept us connected as a family as well as to the fantastic friends we'd made during our short time there.
Being just the two of us for a few days on the road was wild considering we were more "adults" and able to talk to each other and less "parents" in trying to keep our children from murdering us. Still, most of our conversations in time turned to the boys and how we're trying to navigate what's happening in the world and pretending to know what we're doing; we've decided to keep both children.