Movecation Day 1

We have decided to call our travels from Reno our movecation. Technically, it's a move across the country. But since we worked in some cool experiences and adventures it was also a neat vacation. Hence, movecation. As I stated before, the house got packed up on the 26th and 27th. By Thursday night 99% of all we owned was in boxes. We rented a Redbox and watched "The Odd Life of Timothy Green" as a family.

Friday morning the movers arrived to load everything into the van. It took all day. Jason did a great job all three days of running errands and keeping the kids out from under the way of the movers. I gave him all sorts of lists and ideas to keep them occupied and they all left me at home to supervise and help direct the packers and movers. Friday night Rose and Phil had us over to dinner. It was great to spend our last meal in Reno with such great friends, we will miss them so much.

Some pictures of our last sunrise in Reno.

Getting a little snow action in.


Friday night was spent at a hotel and we were on the road by 7 that morning. We drove all day through the great state of Nevada. We made it to Las Vegas about 3:30 with the intent of visiting the Hoover Dam. We had no interest in the visitor's center (it's a little pricey) and frankly, we're quite familiar with dams. One of the perks of Gramma and Grampa Lindh living so close to the Grand Coulee Dam. We just wanted to say we'd seen/crossed it.

We drove 1.5 miles off the exit to the first checkpoint just to be told that we can't go down to the parking with the trailer attached. So we drove back up to the exit, unhitched our little luggage trailer, left it in a dirt lot next to a gas station and headed back down. We still had to go through a special security checkpoint because of our van size. We stopped at the first lot and walked up to the interstate bridge to look down on the dam. Jason does not like heights so he volunteered to take the picture and let the rest of us pose near the railing with the dam in the background.

View from the interstate.


Then we drove down to the lower parking lot and that is where we made another mistake. As we pulled into the parking garage the attendant asked a question, "Do you have any pets in the vehicle?" Without really thinking Jason answered, "Yes." not realizing this would change our plans. Apparently you can't leave pets in that parking lot so we had to drive to the other side of the dam and park there. But once we had slowly driven over the bridge we decided it wasn't worth it to continue up the Arizona side to the parking lot way up on the hill to turn around, walk down to the dam and then walk back up it so that we could drive back over the dam to return to our little trailer.

Headed down to the dam itself and crossing over it.


After clearing the dam we pulled a U-turn and headed back across it and up the mountain to our waiting trailer. Then it was just over another hour of traveling to Kingman, AZ where we stayed the night after a dinner at Sonic.