I’ve put up Jacob’s August pictures, here.

Lastly, I finally got our pictures of the Arches National Park online. They’re here.

Hope you’re all well! Jonathan’s on a business trip to Baltimore until Friday, so Jacob and I are “roughing it out” alone here. I’m looking forward to the quiet time we’ll undoubtedly spend together, although I wish I’d asked Jon where he put the charger for the camera batteries before he left. ;-)

Actually, Barstow seems like a pit and we’ll be glad to be back on the road tomorrow morning. But we’re here, we’re safe, and we’ll definitely reach Pebble Beach tomorrow afternoon. This is the last time we’ll have internet access for at least a few days, though. We’ll have our cell phones and I’m looking forward to sharing pics of our new digs with you all when we’re hooked up.

Hope you’re all well!

I truly feel privileged to have been able to make the drive we made today. I knew today (from Boulder CO to Moab UT) would be the scenic day, but I never could have imagined quite how scenic.

We went from this typical Boulder scene…

To these…

To this…

To this.

Here’s where our hotel is:

We made it here around 4:00pm, so we decided to spend a couple of hours this afternoon/evening driving and walking through Arches National Park, which is about a mile from our hotel. When I get a super-fast network connection, I really need to just put up an entire page of photos from our afternoon, because I have about 50 good ones. The land is unbelievable. Until I get the photo page up, here are a few teasers:

This officially marks the end of the site-seeing part of our drive, I think. America is beautiful, but all we really have left is a bunch of Nevada and the ugly bits of California. So we’ve canceled our reservations in Wells, NV and Truckee, CA (outside Lake Tahoe) in favor of just driving and driving and driving until Jacob wants us to stop for the night. There’s an outside chance we may arrive in Pebble Beach on Tuesday night instead of Wednesday night–I’ll keep you posted. Jacob is excited about the thought of arriving home a day early.

It was a very, very, very wonderful and very, very, very full day.

It seems to be a very activity-friendly place. We saw literally dozens of bicyclists, hikers, rock climbers, runners, and dog-walkers. (I cannot imagine biking the Rockies. These people are fit.)

This afternoon, Jacob was getting cranky so we bended the shabbat rules a little and took a drive around the foothills to the mountains. I don’t think we ever broke 9,000 feet, like we surely will tomorrow. Boulder itself is around 5,000 feet, which isn’t very high (it’s at the base of the actual mountains) but the East of Colorado is so flat that you can see for miles:

You fairly quickly start seeing some tall rocks, though.

It was really neat to realize that after the first set of mountains you see, the Rockies just keep on going. You’re constantly seeing craggy outlines in the mist and mountain tops jutting out of the tree line.

After Jacob woke up from his nap we pulled off at a few scenic lookouts to let him stretch his legs and to get some better pictures. It’s quite cool up in the mountains, and less sunny than down below.

I think we’re at about 8,500 feet here.

Raar! Jacob is as fierce as the mountain!

Here’s another neat cliff we saw on the drive back down to Boulder.

At one of the places we stopped, near a stream, we saw a rock-climber. I don’t have many fears in this world, but I’m pretty sure there’s no way (physically or mentally) that I could do what this person is doing:

Later on in the afternoon, we took a walk to the Nature Conservatory’s campus, which is near our hotel and had a nice little playground for young kids. The grounds drew us in, they were so pretty:

…and here’s Jacob and Jonathan enjoying the playground.

Tonight, we ate at this wonderful little pub recommended by our friend Beth, who grew up here. In addition to tasty food and beer for us, the waitress brought Jacob a plate of fresh watermelon wedges. It’s the most food I’ve ever seen him devour at one sitting–three full quarter-wedges and half of a fourth. He literally gobbled them down, a huge grin on his face, the juice running down his arms in streams. (My steak sandwich smothered in onions, mushrooms, and peppers was damn good too.)

Tomorrow morning, we head from here through the Rockies to Moab, Utah. I’m looking forward to this last push to Pebble Beach, but I’ll definitely be a little sad to leave Boulder. We only got a taste of this fantastic place, and I’d love to come back on a longer vacation and actually get to do some hiking. Anyone interested in making a larger family and/or friends vacation here?

There’s Kansas for you, in a nutshell. Only the Texas panhandle is more boring. We were so relieved when we got to Colorado.

…of course, the scenery didn’t change much with the state line. In fact, the eastern half of Colorado (which we drove through today) looked pretty much like Kansas, except they seemed to grow sunflowers and cows instead of corn and cows.

Finally, finally, as we drove into Boulder, we got our first glimpse of the Rockies.

Boulder is nestled in the foothills, and looks to be quite nice. We’re staying here through our shabbat and will leave Sunday morning. Tomorrow we’re planning on lots of walks around the city, which looks quite nice. I’m sure I’ll have a gazillion pictures to share with you all.

When I look back on this year in the future, I’m pretty sure that this will be the weekend when Jacob “started walking”. He’s been taking a few tentative steps here and there, primarily at our urging and ecstatic clapping, but tonight he stood up from a seated position without any assistance and walked around twenty steps to me. He had the most amazing grin on his face the whole time, and for the next hour and a half, he walked all over the hotel room.

He’s still definitely in the “drunken midget” stage–he’s wobbly, if he tries to turn too quickly or nod his head vigorously (another thing he’s started to do this week) he topples right over, but he’s walking. Really walking. It’s wonderful and strange to watch our baby act like–be a toddler. Every time he does something new or enters a new stage, it becomes my favorite.

But that’s okay, because there’s a lot of new blog stuff to talk about. You’ll already have noticed the new look; I’ve switched my blog-generation software. The main Zog welcome page will stay the same, but the blog itself has a new URL. One upside of this switch is that you can now leave comments; another should be that PC users no longer have trouble reading the text. Please do let me know if you particularly like or dislike anything about the new format, and please comment and let me know what’s going on back in New England, too.

The big excitement of the day is Jacob, who figured out how to dismantle the hotel tub faucet during his bath:

That’s Jon’s son, right there. :) He’s turning into such a little boy. It’s fun and sad to watch, at the same time. Tonight before bed he didn’t want to nurse but was all over getting his own Cheerios and drinking from a straw.

The road trip has put us into a weird time-warp where we have no idea what day it is, what time it is, where we are, etc. I’m glad we road-trip well together, and I’m very glad we’ll be spending a whole day (and 2 nights) in lovely Boulder, CO.

See you tomorrow!

(Edit: I haven’t finished updating the sidebar with our pictures and information, and relevant links. Hopefully I’ll get to that over the weekend. In the meantime, all of the categories and archives and everything dealing with the posts themselves should be fine. I’ve migrated over all of the old posts.)

Today, we passed out of Indiana, through Illinois, and into Missouri, exchanging Interstate 64 for Interstate 70. What you see above is the arch of St. Louis, which was impressively huge. Today was a good road-trip day. We stopped for lunch at a decent place with another indoor playground for Jacob, we made good time, Jacob had good naps and ate well. We arrived here in Marshall MO around 4:00pm local time, and Jacob once more had fun exploring the wonderful world of hotel rooms. (Seriously. He loves it.)

Too bad Marshall MO isn’t more… well, more.

For dinner options, we’ve got Domino’s, McDonald’s, IGA grocery store, and Subway. We’re thinking Subway. On the plus side, the internet at this hotel actually works! Sorry about the blog outage last night.

We saw a lot of this today:

I think we’ve officially reached the “flat” part of the journey. This continues through tomorrow (to Hays, Kansas, not Dulle as I’d erroneously remembered) and into Friday, until we get to Denver and the Rocky Mountains. We’re expecting the early part of next week to be absolutely gorgeous.

So, good road trip day. Jon and I are fairly bummed, though, because the sale of our land in Phippsburg fell through–this leaves us in even worse financial shape than before, since part of the sales agreement included us paying for a $3500 survey of the land, which has already been performed. Sigh. (We’ll be fine, of course, I’m sure we’ll find another buyer, it was just bad news.) Rest assured, too, that Jacob is still as happy as ever:

That’s him carrying on a conversation with one of his toys. It was totally cute. Oh, and just for you, Dad: We saw our first one of these today. *grin*

Hope you’re all well!

People, we have the Midwest. In addition to being in Central time now, we’ve officially reached the Land of the Flat. Our hotel is the tallest thing around for miles despite Evansville being a fairly large city.

Today was only okay, on the whole. Bright sides included a very nice mall to walk around in for lunch (it continues to be Too Hot outside). It was large, and had wood floors, and was quiet, and had the most incredibly awesome place for kids to play:

The floor and all of those structures you see are soft and grippy, so kids can climb and run and jump and fall and not get hurt. Jacob had a blast. We really enjoyed watching him, too.

The countryside continued to be pretty for most of the day, as well. Downsides? Well, Jacob managed to avoid napping this afternoon. Let me tell you, 4 hours with an awake baby in the car does not make anyone happy. Also, Kentucky was not as welcoming as it claimed to be on the sign.

The first two things you see in Kentucky are a huge ugly factory:

And a lane closed off for miles with no reason:

But, here we are safe and sound in an Evansville hotel room with a sleeping baby and Blizzards from the local DQ. (Jon the delivery man rocks.)

Another piece of good news is that our things have arrived safely in California and are now in storage. Jon talked to someone at NPS today who said it would be no problem to deliver our belongings on the 24th of this month. Keep your fingers crossed for us! It would be really, really nice to have exactly one night in the house before officially moving in. Sleep well!

Virginia is in full bloom. This is my Saturday morning breakfast, prepared by our extremely talented and generous hosts Moses and Melissa. Aside from the bread, I think everything on that plate is local to Williamsburg and in season. Fresh-egg omelette with local oyster mushrooms that smelled oh my god good, fresh blackberries from the farmer’s market, tiny sun-gold tomatoes from their own garden. Everything was more delicious than I could possibly describe.

The air in Williamsburg smells alive, and everything is completely lush and green and in bloom. We had a wonderful relaxing weekend, despite an exceptionally cranky Jacob. (Sorry, M&M!) I figure either he’s working on his first-year molars, or a band of demons has taken residence in his mouth. Definitely one or the other.

Sunday Jacob was feeling better, and Moses treated us to freshly made pasta with tomato sauce and meatballs. Jacob was kind enough to help Jon with the meatballs.

After dinner, Melissa and I knit while the guys played board games.

And we had a gorgeous day of driving today, and now we’re in Charleston, WV. It’s really true, what they say. People are much friendlier in the South than in New England. Everywhere we’ve been people stop and smile and talk to us, give us advice, ask about the baby, and so forth. (Mental note: It’s time to give Jacob a haircut. He’s often mistaken for a girl now.)

A bustling and prosperous state West Virginia is not, however. When searching on the web for a mall to stop at for lunch/walk break, we were directed to the “Mallow Mall”. We were underwhelmed.

That’s a boarded-up Burger King, there. Niiiiiiiice. Fortunately, a little further down the highway we found an Applebee’s and had a good lunch. It was right next to a Walmart Supercenter, so we even got to walk Jacob somewhere other than outside in the 90-plus degree heat.

So if you want to shop, don’t come to West Virginia. The countryside is gorgeous, however.

The road trip is officially going pretty well. Our strategy is to start off early so that Jacob can catch a long nap in the car, take a mini-break at a rest stop (where he can play on the grass), drive a little further to a mall or other place we can take a long break for lunch, wear him out at lunch, and hop back on the road for another long stretch while he naps again. Then another rest stop break in the afternoon and some tv (courtesy of Nancy’s portable DVD player) as we finish our drive. Jacob absolutely loves the rest stop breaks, because he gets to run around.

Today, we got to the hotel around 4pm which was great, because the hotels are definitely Jacob’s favorite part of the whole experience. Every time we come into a new hotel he gets this huge grin on his face, makes little laughing-hooting noises and crawls as fast as he can around the room, pulling himself up on everything he can.

And for those who were wondering, Jacob has begun to walk. Only a few steps at a time, but at this point he’s done 3 steps perhaps a dozen times and it’s fairly easy to get him to try it. We’re hoping that he doesn’t begin racing around until after we reach California. Wish us luck!

Hope you’re all happy and well, and we’ll see you tomorrow night in Evansville, IN.

This morning was perfect. We finished up a fantastic visit with wonderful family, the sun was shining, Jacob was asleep, the highways were clear.

We had a great time at a rest stop mid-morning, too.

Furthermore, Maryland is lush and interesting to drive through, and our business travel finally paid off in that we knew somewhere outside Baltimore to get a good lunch and walk around.

Alas, 3.5 hours of the afternoon was spent, once more, in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Seriously. 3.5 hours of the view looking something like this:

That’s a completely empty carpool-only lane you see there on the left. We missed the one place in 100 miles you can actually get into the carpool lane and rued our inattention for the rest of the afternoon.

(Unhappy chocolate for unhappy people.)

The main reason the afternoon only warrants 1.3 New Jerseys is that Jacob slept for the vast majority of the traffic. The scenery was also pretty nice.

Things are really looking up, too. We’re now in Williamsburg for the weekend, seeing some very dear friends we haven’t seen in ages. Monday we start our big drive West, and both Jon and I are really looking forward to putting some miles on the car. We’ve even figured out how to attach the portable DVD player to the seat in front of Jacob, so we think he’s looking forward to the driving too.

I doubt I’ll be blogging over the weekend, so here’s something for you: Garfield is much funnier without Garfield’s thought bubbles. No, really. (You absolutely want to click those links.)

Happy weekend, everyone! We’ll catch up with you Monday night in lovely Charleston, West Virginia.