Quist World Tour

One of the best things about driving rather than flying across the country is watching the land change. In Michigan, we drove through forest and farmland, and we knew that not so very far away was the Lake Michigan shoreline that we know and love. When you get past Chicago, eventually the land opens up to the farmland (corn and wind, as far as I can tell) of Iowa and Nebraska. Northeast Colorado brings you through what is usually dry ranchland, but this year the heavy rains have turned Colorado green as far as the eye can see. It’s startling if you are expecting yellow grasses to cover the hills. As we got closer to Estes Park this week, we noticed first a lot of cows roaming the land, and then between Sterling and Greeley we saw more of what might be the factory farms—enormous numbers of cows in small fenced-in areas. Those farms you can smell before you see them. Today we drove from Estes Park to Arroyo Seco, a small town near Taos NM. Along the way we passed the Rocky Mountai...

It’s already the end of the third day of the Girls Road Trip, and we are still alive and kicking. Time to report! I am visiting Colorado briefly, to deliver Allison to my sister-in-law for a couple of weeks, and then I’m taking Natalie and three of her close friends to New Mexico. Tuesday morning we departed only half an hour past schedule, with a car packed out to the gills. I will own that it was because of me that we left late, and even so I forgot the sunscreen, the plastic silverware and my phone charger. I will further own that the extra baggage was not due to teenage-girl overpacking; I had the great idea of planning out the meals for two weeks, and then packing all the food supplies for those meals. Seemed like a good idea, until the time came to put it all in the car. Somehow I got almost everything in. Problem was, we still had to pick up the third friend! She was at a cottage on Lake Michigan near Indiana, so we were meeting her and her parents at a highway exit...