The Final AVERT2015 Recap! :)

I was trying to not have a super long post, but in order to wrap up AVERT2015, this post is gonna be a little lengthy (BUT, it will FINALLY wrap up the recap). It only took me a month to complete. Lol. Thank you for your patience! :) I hope you enjoy (again, sorry for so much in this post). :)

We stayed in Bowman, ND and the next day, found a cute little museum (of course we did). It was actually kind of interesting. If you find yourself near Bowman, go check out the Pioneer Trails Regional Museum.

The newspaper at the bottom is an actual copy of the paper from when Lincoln was assassinated

I like the fact that Teddy Roosevelt read a book a day his entire adult life. I wish I could do that!

After leaving Bowman, we made a quick stop at a historical marker. We actually read about Fort Dilts at the museum, and decided to take a little detour to see it. 

It was kinda neat that at one of the grave markers, the great-great granddaughter of one of the men killed there had left a note to him.

Yes, we made a random stop to take pictures of sunflowers (my mom loves sunflowers).

We made it to Montana (our 6th state) by lunchtime. Our goal was to make it most of the way across Montana in a day, since we were going to try and squeeze in two days at Yellowstone. We did make a quick (well, hour and a half) stop at Pompeys Pillar. This is where William Clark (of Lewis and Clark) carved his name in the side of a rock back in 1806. This is the last remaining physical evidence of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. 

No, I didn't really step in the boat. BUT, they should know better than to tempt me. :) They also had a replica jacket that Lewis and Clark would have worn. That thing was heavy!

Taking a selfie with William Clark- he wouldn't smile

After A LOT of driving, we finally stopped in Bozeman, MT for the night. We found a cute hotel called C'mon Inn. It was by far the nicest hotel we stayed at while on our trip. If I were to go back and visit Bozeman, I would stay there. I loved that our room had a balcony view over a lobby area (that had 9 hot tubs). 

Not, this wasn't a real goat

The next day we got up and made the drive to Yellowstone National Park. The drive TO Yellowstone was just as pretty as Yellowstone itself. We stopped to take a lot of pictures (no, I won't post them all). :)

I really wanted to put my feet in the water, but I refrained

We realized on our way to Yellowstone we had time for a quick trip to Idaho (state number 7!) It was a little out of our way, but worth it to cross another state off our list.

Our goal was to stop and see something in each state we visited (not counting the state sign). We noticed we were close to the Longest Main Street in America, so we decided to drive down that. It wasn't anything too exciting, but still, it's something historical (have you noticed we are history nerds?) :)

On our way back towards Yellowstone, we noticed a pizza parlor near a place called Mack's Inn Resort, so we stopped there for lunch. We had been searching for a hotel room near Yellowstone (since we planned to go there two days) and the cheapest one was $160 (and that was for a Motel 6). Some advice: If you plan on going to Yellowstone and want to stay the night nearby, book it MONTHS in advance for a good deal, or you will pay the price. Anyways, while we were eating, we noticed the little inn next door. I checked and they had an available room. It was MUCH cheaper than anything else we had seen, so we booked a room for that night. It was only about 30 minutes from the West Yellowstone entrance. We finally got to Yellowstone by early afternoon.

We crossed into our 8th state (Wyoming) while inside Yellowstone. If you have never been to Yellowstone, you do a lot of driving. There are many places to pull over so you can see the scenery and take pictures, but the "main attractions" are about 35-40 minutes apart (unless you have wildlife in the road that delay you). You can only go about 45 miles per hour inside the park. Of course we HAD to see Old Faithful, so we decided to make that our first stop of the day. They can guesstimate when Old Faithful will erupt (usually every 90 minutes or so). After looking for a spot in the Old Faithful parking lot for about 10 minutes, we finally got out of the car and made our way over to it. No joke, we had just managed to get a spot kinda up close when it erupted. We made it just in time (it would have been disheartening to have just missed it and had to wait another hour and a half to see it). I was able to get a video of it. I'm gonna try and upload the video here (not sure it will work or not).

We drove around for several more hours, checking out waterfalls and some of the many geysers. Yellowstone is beautiful. I'm sad we only had two days to visit. They do warn you about the wildlife. We did see some while we were there. We saw several elk and a herd of bison (a park ranger informed us that they were bison and not buffalo). There are no buffaloes in North America. The song "Home on the Range" totally lied to us. My childhood is ruined (not really).

Disclaimer before you look at the pictures of me and the bison. I am NOT as close as I seem. I had several friends message me about my safety when I posted them on social media. I'm not THAT brave (or stupid, I guess) to get that close to wildlife. :) It is ALL about the camera angles. And there were people a lot closer than me (so I figured I could out run them if need be). Lol. Again, I could bore you with MANY Yellowstone pictures, I tried to only pick a few (okay, a little more than a few).

It was supposed to rain all day, but it held off until the end of the day. And it stopped after about 30 minutes. But it did bring the temperatures down, I was forced to put on my hoodie!

We got out to take our selfies with the bison and had just made it back to the car when the herd decided to cross the road. As you can tell, they had the right-of-way. Lol. ;)

After staying the night at the inn in Idaho, we went back the next day for what we thought would be a quick day at Yellowstone (we had planned to leave by 1pm, we didn't leave until 5pm). A lot of that was due to road construction (yes, even Yellowstone cannot escape road construction), and also a back up of cars due to people getting out of their vehicles to see a grizzly bear and her cubs eating a bison (hope it wasn't one we met the day before). We caught a glimpse of the grizzly (from the safety of the car), but unfortunately could not get a good picture. But hey- we saw a bear! The only wildlife we didn't see was a moose (I was disappointed). I'll spare you the gory details of how I suffered a little bit of car sickness (which never happens to me). Thankfully there were plenty of places to pull over, so no damage was done to my car. Lol. It also happened as we were leaving, so I didn't miss much of the scenery (I took a Dramamine and slept for a while after that but Mel told me I didn't miss anything exciting as we were leaving). Since we stayed so long at Yellowstone, we had to skip visiting Cody, WY (although we did stop at the Buffalo Bill Dam just outside of it).

We made it all the way to Casper, WY to stay the night. That meant we only had about four hours to drive the next day to make it to Denver, CO (it was actually a little less than that thanks to Wyoming's 85 miles per hour speed limit on the interstate). I was excited about our trip to Denver because we were able to go to a Rockies baseball game, meaning I can cross another ballpark off my bucket list (and I can update #3 on my 101 in 1001 list)! Thanks to Mel for sitting through a baseball game (she had to put up with my sports watching while we were roommates). :) Coors Field was beautiful (they didn't serve Dr Pepper, so I had to remove one star from my review). Lol. But besides that, it was awesome. We found GREAT seats on StubHub. They were normally $60 club level seats but we got them for about half of that cost. They were playing the Braves that night (my second favorite team). Sadly, the Braves didn't win, but that's okay.

A storm hit Denver that night. The rain held off until the last out of the game, but the sky looked really pretty as the storm was rolling in. 

The next morning we were ready to head for home, but first we stopped by the Garden of the Gods. It was breath-taking. Sadly we didn't get to spend as much time as we would have liked (I was possibly ready to get home), but I'm glad we made time to drive through it.

You can see Pike's Peak behind me. Those are the "purple mountains majesties" in the song America the Beautiful

New Mexico was the 10th state of our trip. We were only there for about an hour (we cut across a corner of it to get from Colorado to Texas, but we did make one quick stop (just to say we were there).

I'll admit I was very happy to see the Texas state sign (the 11th and final state of our trip)- it was good to be "home" (although the state sign and MY home were still seven hours apart. It always seems the longest part of any road trip is getting through Texas). Lol. We stopped about 10 pm for dinner in Amarillo (yes, the first place we ate at in Texas was Whataburger, are you surprised?) The whole day I had been determined to get home that night (usually towards the end of a trip, I'm just ready to be home), but Amarillo was still a good five and a half hours from Dallas, so we decided it would be best to stay the night in Amarillo and just get up early the next morning to get home. Yes, I did sing "Amarillo by Morning" when we left the next day. I figured George Strait would appreciate that. Lol.

Yes, I did hug the Texas state sign, don't judge. Lol

I took a picture of my mileage when we left and when we got back. We drove a total of 3,846. Totally worth it!

Thanks for sticking with me during this recap. Sorry today's post was so long. I was ready to just be done with it. :) We are already planning a road trip for next year, so stay tuned for that! Have a great day! XOXO!

What I'm Loving Wednesday and AVERT2015 Recap Part 1

I'm back after an AMAZING road trip last week. I had a blast. There is too much to put into one post, so I'll break it up into several posts (you'll get a sneak peak today). Be sure to check back for more updates on it. I always post on Twitter when I update my blog, so feel free to follow me there. We used the hashtag #AVERT2015 on Twitter and Instagram for our trip (feel free to search it if you want). It stands for "A Very Epic Road Trip". :)

My wonderful co-host Jodi is on a blogging sabbatical this week, but I would still love it you linked up with me today! 

I'm loving...

That I visited 11 states in a span of 10 days. And seven of those states were ones I had never visited before (I'm slowly working my way to all 50 states). 

I'm loving...

That my former college roommate Mel went on this road trip with me. We went on road trips when we were in college, and we had been talking about taking another one for a few years now. We finally did it! We even had a playlist on my iPod of songs we listened to in college. Ah, memories!

Before the start of our 11 state journey...

I'm loving...

That we weren't even out of Texas before our first unplanned stop took place. Road trips are all about making unexpected stops along the way (at least with us). We stopped in Denison to visit the birthplace of Dwight Eisenhower (it made sense to stop, since we were going to his presidential library in Kansas). This was also something I can cross of my 101 in 1001 list (#3 Places in Texas I've never been to before).

I'm loving...

This personalized autograph from Dick Van Dyke. As you know, he's my favorite actor of ALL time. Last month he and his wife mentioned on Twitter they had extra copies of his autobiography (which I already owned), but if you bought a copy through them, and told him what to write, he would personalize an autograph for you. How could I pass that up? I'll just own two copies of his book. But I'll treasure this copy for the rest of my life. And yes, I did ask him to write that. :)

I'm loving...

That I made the latest issue of the Texas Rangers Magazine (which is the souvenir program they sell at the games). They had a social media contest where you submitted a picture of you cheering on the Rangers at another ballpark (it's a segment called "Rangers Roadtrip"). I sent in a picture of me when I went to see the Rangers play at Fenway Park in Boston. They selected my picture for an issue and mailed me a copy of the magazine. I feel kind of famous. :) 

I decided to end my post today with a quick recap of the first two days of our trip. Like I said, we stopped at the Eisenhower birthplace before we got out of Texas. The first state of our trip was Oklahoma.

Why yes, we did sing the theme song from the musical Oklahoma as we crossed the border. And we realized we only knew the first few lines. Lol.

After driving almost 100 miles into Oklahoma (give or take a few miles), we finally found a place to stop and eat. We spend the night in Tulsa and the next day we went to the Hard Rock Casino...and discovered that gambling was NOT for us. We maybe spent an hour in there, but we spent most of that time taking pictures of the memorabilia. We both spent a dollar on the penny slots, and we both lost a dollar. I found gambling to be somewhat boring (I guess that's a good thing, right?) It was a cool place to visit though.

An Elvis jumpsuit. You know me, if it's Elvis related, I'm taking a picture

They told us not to take pictures of the slot machines (what can I say, I live life on the edge). Although you really can't tell there are slot machines in this picture. Oh well, I tried. Lol. 

We didn't eat here, but I did pose for a picture

After that, we visited the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum. Mel's cousin works there and gave us a behind the scenes tour. As a museum nerd aficionado, I really enjoyed it. I've been to many museums, but it was so cool to see what goes on in preparing the exhibits and how they catalog everything. If you are ever in Tulsa, be sure to check out this museum (click here for the address). I think it's one of Tulsa's best kept secrets. They have so many exhibits that include the first ever traffic Yield sign, the first Barbie doll, classic cars, old soda shop benches, and a death mask of Pretty Boy Floyd (the only other death masks of Floyd are owned by the FBI and the Ohio Historical Society).

1958 Ford Edsel

Cool like James Dean..

Thanks to Mel's cousin Ian for the tour of his awesome museum, we had a blast!

We ended our first (full) day with a stop in Abilene, Kansas. I'll talk more about our adventures there in my next post (I would love to say that would be tomorrow, but we all know my track record of updating my blog on a regular basis. It will be soon, I promise!) :)

I was singing "Carry On My Wayward Son" as we crossed the Kansas border (for someone who is tone deaf, I sure did do a lot of singing on this trip). Lol.

XOXO!!

What I'm Loving Wednesday!

I've realized it's REALLY difficult to write a What I'm Loving post when I've felt like doing this to people all day long.

There will come a day when I "Gibbs" slap someone, it's gonna happen

But anyways, Jodi and I are excited to bring you another installment of What I'm Loving Wednesday (even if it took some time and thought for me to write mine). Lol. :) Like I say every week, we don't have a lot of rules for this link up, but try and leave a comment on the blog of the person on the list before you. Link ups are a great way to meet new bloggers and friends! :) Also, be sure you link your post back to mine and Jodi's so others can join in on the link up fun! :) You can grab a button from the side bar to the right!

I'm loving...

That I'm finally on Book 6 of the Harry Potter Series (I finished Book 5 last Thursday during my snow day). I started Book 6 then got distracted by my Castle marathon. I have just one more book to go in the series after this one! I know, I know- I've been reading this series forever (as one of my best friends keeps reminding me). I will say that Book 5 was the best one of the series so far (in my opinion).

I'm loving...

That my Rangers season tickets are in the mail!! I should have them this week! I'm so ready for baseball season. For better or for worse, I'm a Rangers fan for life (although sadly it's been "worse" lately). :(

I'm loving...

That I had a lengthy conversation with actor Tim Dunigan on Twitter the other day. You can check his IMDB page here (he left his acting career in 2002 to become a mortgage broker, so he hasn't been in anything recently). My best friend and I remember him best from his days as Davy Crockett back in the late 80s. She and I were are Texas history nerds fans aficionados and are partial to all things surrounding the Alamo. Davy Crockett has always been my favorite Alamo defender. Hey- all Texans have a favorite Alamo defender. At least I think they do. I think they should. Lol. 

Fun fact about Mr. Dunigan: He was cast to play Face on the TV Show The A-Team, but they felt he looked too young, so he was replaced by Dirk Benedict. Another fun fact. He was in an episode of Diagnosis Murder, which starred my favorite actor (as you all know by now), Dick Van Dyke.

This is pretty much the only video I can find of the Davy Crockett show he was in. Well, they were more like movies that Disney aired on Sunday nights. I forget which station it was on- some network station I believe. I do have a photo of me at age 10 dressed up like Davy Crockett, but I'll save that embarrassing photo for another day.

I'm loving... That I'm slowly getting out of my "staying at home all the time" funk and am making plans to go out and socialize. I am attending a Girls Weekend in Houston in April and in May my college roommate and I are having a Roommate Reunion one weekend. I'm super excited about that! :)
I'm loving... My friend Dianne's jewelry. She posted this picture on Facebook as I was working on this post. I had to include it as something I was loving. In fact, I just bought one of the necklaces in this picture. :) Please check out her store here. She has amazing pieces! 

Hope everyone is having a great week! Thanks for stopping by, don't forget to link up below!  XOXO!