Saturday, July 11, 2009

Sabbatical blog - day six; Road trip edition part deux

At about 9:15 pm MST, Chandler, Addie and I arrived at our home in Breckenridge for the next five weeks. We started our day on the road in Lubbock at 9 am CST. It was a long, hard day of driving but well worth it when we arrived to sub-60 degree temperatures.

Overall the drive today was smooth and seemed to go by pretty fast once we finally got out of Texas. While Austin is a great place to live, being so 'deep in the heart' of Texas makes it challenging to take road trips out of Texas because it takes so long to get out of the state. If you have ever traveled cross country on I-10, you know what I mean. West Texas, while a relatively easy drive because it's so flat, is a mentally taxing drive. Seemed like the hardest stretch today was the first one from Lubbock to Amarillo, about 115 miles.

New Mexico was a quick 100ish mile drive. The "Safety Corridor" during the middle of the stretch was interesting, not sure if it actually achieves what they're trying to do by making drivers turn on their lights and drop their speed by 5 MPH. Seems like it's just a reason for cops to write tickets.

Colorado was moving along quickly until the rain hit in Colorado Springs which resulted in a couple of accidents turning I-25 into a parking lot for about an hour. But if you take the whole trip into account, that was really our only slowdown.

The place here in Breck is great. The pictures on the Web do not do it justice. It has already exceeded my expectations. Much bigger than I thought it would be and is about 3 miles from downtown Breck. Looking forward to getting settled in tomorrow, exploring a bit and breathing in some of the mountain air. Looking forward even more to the rest of my family getting here on Monday afternoon.

In non-road trip related news, apparently the Astros can't handle the pressure for more than a day of being a .500 ball club. They got some stellar pitching in giving 13 runs to baseball's worst team.

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