Sandy's Results, According To The Glores

Whew. Sandy has officially welcomed us to Pennsylvania, or perhaps exactly the opposite. We have been hunkered down in a very wet Pittsburgh while Sandy tried her best to destroy the lower part of Manhattan island. We had a great day, with 4.5 hours of fun at the Children's Museum (awesome art options!) and dinner with my cousins. The rain was light, the winds mostly non-existent.

But then we started trying to figure out what we do next. We haven't been able to get in touch with anyone at the new park, but know that the park itself is closed at least until Thursday. The vacation rental house we were planning to stay in for the next ten days doesn't have power and doesn't expect to have to have power restored for 7-10 days. Ooops. There are 19 road closures in our new county, including the main road in sections. Not so good either.

Our decision? We're going to move closer to our new home, but not quite there. Officials are asking people to stay off the roads except for emergency travel, for one thing. And for another, we're assuming that no hotel will take new guests if they don't have power and that any hotel in the immediate area that does have power is probably full of storm refugees.

So we're going as far as Scranton tomorrow. They have power, there are only minor road closures, and we found a hotel with a lot of vacancies. Also with a true one bedroom suite with a door between the bedroom and the rest of the suite just in case we end up staying there for several days while power is restored to everything closer to where we'll be living.

Ah, Sandy, you really know how to make people feel welcome in their new home! We could have done without this particular welcome mat.

Life Is Exhausting

I had this misconception that driving across the country instead of flying would minimize our experience of jet lag. But our driving schedule (and socializing schedule, to be honest) has meant that we haven't been able to take advantage of the gradual time change and keep Darcy's bedtime at a normal hour. And so, having crossed into Eastern Daylight Time earlier today, it was a struggle to get her to sleep by 10:15. Hopefully, we can start to fix this problem in Pittsburgh. It now looks like we may be there three nights, as all park employees are being told to ride out the storm at home rather than at work. We'll get updates about power outages, downed trees, and flooding and make that decision on Tuesday morning, I think.

And that's my extremely exciting blog post for the day. We had a great time in St Louis. Saw many, but not all of the folks we'd hoped to catch up with and some, but not all of the places we wanted to show Darcy. Pictures tomorrow unless somehow Pittsburgh is without power!

My Network Administrator Prevented Blogging

You know how your computer sometimes gives you an error message that ends, "If this problem persists, contact your network administrator." My network administrator is Michael. When we get to a new hotel, he's the one who figures out how to connect us to their padlocked wi-fi. If there's a problem, he takes care of it.

But last night, he failed me for the very first time and couldn't get me internet access in our friends' home. So you all went blog postless and almost did tonight as well. Luckily (?) for you, Hurricane Sandy is disrupting our travel plans, so I had to have access to cancel a couple hotel reservations and make new ones to keep us out of the storm for a couple days. We'll reassess depending on how widespread the power outages are on Wednesday.

We are having a great time in St Louis. Good friends, good food, almost no driving, and beautiful places to hang out. What could be better? 

That's all I have tonight. Hope those of you reading on the eastern seaboard are prepared for whatever ends up coming your way. Stay safe. We're hoping to get to western PA before the storm really arrives and then stay put through the worst of the driving conditions. I'll keep you posted unless all of PA loses power!

Getting Closer To St Louis

So, of course, part of me is excited about living in Pennsylvania, near my folks and other family, a lot of old friends both from high school, college, general life, and Ashokan, and near the big, wicked city that I do love (in moderate doses). But another part of me is sad to have left Crescent City friends and California family. While talking with a Crescent City friend today, I realized that I'm dealing with this by not thinking as much as I should about house-hunting in Pennsylvania and other details that indicate the permanency of this sojourn across the country. Right now, I can close my mind and think of this as a really great vacation. After all, we stopped at a Lewis and Clarke interpretation site this morning and we're staying in a cool old hotel on the Missouri River tonight.

And tomorrow, we'll arrive in St Louis where we can show Darcy our old house and school and favorite places. That is the most vacation-y part of the trip, and we will stop driving east for 48 hours of old friends in our old city. With any luck, the time with old friends will remind me that leaving  a place with great people doesn't mean that the great people leave your life. It just means that they're a little further away.

There's an anthropological term for people who aren't biologically related to you, but play the role of family in your life: fictive kin. I have gathered fictive kin wherever I've gone in my life and it makes for a richer, more meaningful existence. And just as my uncle isn't any less my uncle if he's on the other side of the country, neither do the ties of fictive kinship lessen with distance. 

It's a good thing to keep in mind during transitions.

Arches!

We crossed another time zone today. We have been out of our house for eight nights. Driving 350-400 miles a day since then. We're tired. And so, I am especially grateful for the amazing natural beauty of Arches National Park, which needs no captioning:

Hickison Petroglyphs

As mentioned yesterday, one of our stretch breaks along the "Loneliest Highway in America" was at the Hickison Petroglyph site. I had read about it as one of the few possible stops during that drive and it couldn't have come at a better time. We were all ready to get out of the car. There were beautiful views and beautiful lichen (if you didn't already know, I'm a huge fan of lichen and I know I've posted lichen pictures on this blog before, but I can't find them):

In this picture, as you can see, I've combined the view and the lichen...clever, huh?

If I was more ambitious, I'd get the pictures from today off the camera and show you all the mind-blowingly beautiful scenery in and around Arches National Park. But my child is asleep, my husband is well on his way to asleep, and I'd like to get there, too. Tonight, we are all sleeping in Denver, after a lovely visit with our friend Gretel for dinner. Last time we saw Gretel, she had her lovely dog Tule with her and they got a mention in this blog post about Darcy and animals (Gretel, there is a picture of Tule).

Tomorrow, we drive the rest of the way across Colorado and much of the way across Nebraska. It's been a lot of driving and I have to say that I am looking forward to TWO NIGHTS in the same place. Two more long days and one very short day of driving left until we hit St Louis and stay put for 48 hours!

Moab!

We made it safely to Moab while it was still light yesterday, but the internet was so slow last night that I skipped posting. This is a cheat: I am post-blogging for yesterday.

Top photo: Darcy and Salmon with the kokanee at the stream bank viewing windows. Most of the kokanee in this stretch of stream were spawned out and dead, unfortunately, but we saw plenty of live ones in the stream. Bottom photo: Darcy and Michael on top of the scenic viewpoint at Hickison Petroglyphs off Route 50, the loneliest road in America.