June 19-25th • Father’s Day Family Journey

As we speak we are driving from our new home in Iowa back to Texas to pick up our trailer before heading to Southern California to spend a few weeks with our family. It’s papa’s birthday this month and we are excited to be able to go and spend it with him. We now have a new Toterhome which makes traveling a little more comfortable for our family. I’ll do a post on that at a later date as I’m just trying to get you all updated on what we have done so far.

I will start by saying one of the favorite things for us while staying in New Mexico was this little local taco shop called Casa Taco. We made sure we went there every chance we got. We feel that it’s super important to support small local businesses and when the owners and staff are so friendly and the food is amazing, why not? We had to do laundry and get some basic life things done on Saturday. We then of course had to head to Casa Taco for some epic Mexican and family fun. The wait was a little longer than normal but that is ok because they have some good beer on tap that kept us satisfied until our food was ready.

Sunday was Father’s Day and what better way to celebrate than going on a trip. What do you call a road trip when you live on the road? I don’t know if it’s called vacation if you are already are kind of on vacation but, that is what we decided to do. I mean it was kind of a working trip we had some business to do in California and decided we would make it a family trip. We loaded up and started the journey to Northern California. It was a bit of a jaunt to get to Thousand Oaks, CA from Elephant Butte, NM. Here is a map of the round trip that we took leaving on the 20th then returning on the 26th. Total 2,399 Miles or 3,861 KM Bet a lot of our readers can’t say they have done that many in a lifetime let alone in 6 days!

You ask what’s it’s like to drive and drive? Well, this is the view of the backseat most days….although it is a different one of the kids every day. Noah is sitting behind me right now as we speak trying to talk me out of putting this picture on the blog. I can say too bad because this is what being on the road looks like. He also wanted to know why I don’t have pictures of me sleeping, well duh because I write the blog. 🙂

If you drive from El Paso, Texas to Tucson, AZ you will see what felt like 1,000 signs saying “The Thing”. I mean you gotta admit that when you see the same sign over and over it does pique your interest. It was about time for a pee break anyway so when we got to “The Thing” in Dragoon, AZ we had to stop and see what all they hype was about. It was $10 for this mini mueseum to see “The Thing”. It was pretty much just a “what if” aliens were amoung us and some dinosauers. I mean it was a good way to stretch our legs but, I wouldn’t go out of my way to see this that is for sure. John wasn’t impressed by the aliens he thought they were real and it made him freaked out, to this day he still talks about the aliens.

After, we did our tour of “The Thing” we had to hit the road as we had a long way to go still. Our goal was to make it to Thousand Oaks, CA. We did make it of course it was a long drive but, we have all gotten used to the long days on the road. I think we actuly have gotten to the point that we look forward to the next trip. It’s funny I think about it and the truth is this is all one trip and one journey with lots of little pitstops along the way. Our family has gotten closer and been able to explore so much during this journey of being on the road. Although we are super busy all the time we know it is completly worth it for all the experiences we have had. We spent a couple days in California for some business we needed to take care of and then we headed to Vegas to finish off our trip.

We decided to spend a couple of days in Vegas to relax from the driving and just hang out. We did some shopping, swimming, and sightseeing. It only rains in Vegas a few days a year and it happened to be one of the days we were there. Desert rain is much different than other rain as it comes super fast, pours really hard, and then is gone and dried up within 30 mins. We were staying in the Excalibur for a few nights, so we had some time to explore The Strip. But of course, we had to go get some lunch at the Buca di Beppo in the hotel, and I can say that we were not disappointed! The food was great and we all shared a big pasta platter. We started off by exiting the hotel and going to get some clothes, as we needed some clothes because we didn’t bring enough clothes for more than 4 days and we needed some more. We then went to T-Mobile so that Noah could get a U.S. number since he had to shut off his Canadian number after crossing the American border. After that, we all went back to the hotel to swim in the pools and cool off (Vegas was already hot again after the rain!). The Excalibur has 2 pools for anyone and one for adults, they also have a water slide that goes into one of the pools, so we spent the first bit at the pool going down the slides of course. We then just hung around the pool and the hot tub for a little bit before we went inside the hotel to go eat supper. After our “pool fun” we all headed up to our rooms to get clean and showered off before going back downstairs to eat supper.

We came down the elevator and decided to walk around the main casino area to find a restaurant to eat in since we had $50 food credit if we ate at the hotel, so we chose to eat at Vegabond, which was a bar. We all ate and had a couple of beers of course, and then the boys (Noah, Malachi, and Kevin) went to explore the hotels of Vegas while I put the kids to bed. By now it was around 9:00-10:00 pm and they stayed out for around 30 minutes to an hour. When they got back, Kevin and I went down to use the $200 that the hotel gave us to gamble with, and we ended the night with $80 more than we started with.

Once we finished our mini-vacation in Las Vegas we started the journey back. We made it to Holbrook, AZ, and stayed the night there before heading all the way back to Elephant Butte, NM. This is the sunset from the hotel we stayed at the last night of our trip.