A Year Ago Today...January 1st

We hit the road bright and early on January 1st at 8 AM. We had actually gotten on the road at almost exactly 8 AM every morning of our journey. It always surprised us how few people were also on the road. Throughout our entire trip it seemed at times that  we were the only people in sight.

See what I mean? Not another car insight. 

By mid-morning we started getting a little stir crazy in the car. We started playing the "what if" game. Like asking questions such as, "what if a space ship dropped out of the sky in front of us?", "what if we saw a dead body on the side of the road?", "what if we saw a hitch hiker all the way out here?". It was a good way  to pass the time. Then we asked, "what if a wild horse started running along side the car?". Since we had a bag of animal crackers we went ahead and acted out our last 'what if' question. 

And before we knew it we came upon our last state welcome sign...the most important sign of them all. 

What a beautiful sight. 

In case you didn't hear me in the video, I said that we shared the driving 80/20...but it was really more like 90/10.

Shortly after crossing into California we saw signs for an inspection station that said EVERYONE MUST STOP. We started to get a little nervous, not because we had anything we shouldn't have but because our backseat was so full that we thought for sure that they would make us empty the contents out or give us a ticket for an obstructed view. Thankfully neither of those happened...they just asked if we had any fruit, nuts, or plants in the car. Strange! The lady did kinda glance in the back and waved us on when she saw all of our crap in the back.

That was the last video and photo's we took of our trip. The last hour of our drive took us through Los Angeles with major traffic. The freeway was packed but everyone still drove at 70+ miles per hour. It also happened to be the Rose Bowl so traffic was even heavier than normal. 

We exited the freeway at noon and pulled into our friends place shorty thereafter. We made excellent time and were really proud of ourselves. I had always wanted to drive across the country and now we had. Check that one off my bucket list. 

Thank you for following along on our Westward journey. It was a pleasure to write and remember our trip. It is hard to believe that we have been in California for a year now. We hope that next year here will be as exciting and as fun as our first.