Albuquerque

Before we left home, I made arrangements to see the Telephone Museum of New Mexico. It normally isn't open on Thursdays, but we had a big enough group, they agreed to open it just for us. Our appointment was at 9:00 and it was within walking distance of our hotel.

Since we weren't sure how accessible things were going to be, we left Prima Donna at the hotel, but we packed everything up so we could hit the road quickly. Susie was our tour guide and she was amazing! When she was younger, she worked as an engineer for Bell telephones and I think she knew everything there is to know about phones.

After we left the museum, we loaded quickly and checked out of the hotel. We had reservations to do some whitewater rafting in Durango. Sometime shortly after we grabbed a quick lunch at McDonald's, I got an email that told us our rafting trip had been canceled. Some chemicals had been spilled into the river upstream and they were canceling all raft trips until Saturday.

I immediately called the company, but there was nothing they could do but refund our money. The kids were so disappointed, as we continued our trek toward Durango. We stopped at an A&W and got free root beer floats. Did you know it was National Root Beer Float day?

We didn't even stop in Durango; just kept moving toward Moab. We found a park in a little place called Dolores. The kids loved a chance to stretch and run around for a few minutes. My sweetie and I took a stroll along the river (we didn't see any chemicals...).

We arrived in Moab about 8:00, checked into the hotel and let the kids go swimming. Then we had dinner in the room and sent them to bed early. Some of us are going to hike to the Delicate Arch in the morning so we need to sleep.

Tomorrow night we will be back in our own beds. I love vacations, but I'm glad when they are over too. This one had been long and incredibly fun, but there is always the laundry and the stack of mail, and getting the kids ready to go back to school, football, dance, scouts, and all that other stuff waiting for me at home. I started working on the insurance claim for Teach's car already, but that will require a good deal of time next week too.

But wait, for another 24 hours, I'm still on vacation. We can talk about all this later.