Traveling again

So, Mom had asked me to go with her out to Arizona to see her brother-in-law’s new baby.  This trip has been planned for a while, and I rather think it’s perfectly timed for when I needed a break from it all.  The scary thing is the news of weird things going on keep happening.  I hadn’t been planning on writing posts on the trip and then I found out there were a couple of people who were counting on these posts to know what we’re doing…….  Best laid plans of mice and men.

Yesterday we drove for somewhere around 8 hours and got to our ideal stopping point by bribing the kids with promises of swimming in the pool in the morning and having a short drive to get to our first short stop……..

And then we got up in the morning and headed over to the pool to discover it had no water in it………  Then we started driving for a fairly short drive, but the kids thought we’d meant 30 minutes, not 3 hours.

We finally got to Las Cruces and discovered a nice little “science museum” in a mall.  It had the most fascinating exhibit on mechanical toys.  They’d show you how the gears or “cams” worked in theory and then they’d show you what the cross section of the toy working looked like.  The kids alternated between being fascinated and wanting to know what else there was.  A very delicate balance there.

We got to one of our destinations (a small town that my grandma lived in for as long as I could remember).  It was super amusing for me because we ate dinner tonight at a restaurant I remember eating at several times growing up.  Mom was very amused to hear the memories I had of the place.

I remember going there one time when I was about 10 or so, and the waitress mistook my Mom for my older sister, but my Grandma for both of our mother……  My Grandma was ever so upset that she wasn’t the oldest sister, but the Mom.

I remember listening to folk music there one time, in particular “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover,” Mom was rather amazed that I could point to the rough area in the restaurant that we were sitting in when these events happened.

And, I think this might have been the place we were at when I discovered that cactus hurt and you don’t want to touch them at all.  NO TOUCHIE!

Tomorrow, we’re going to tour Tubac and all of those artsy little stores, and amuse the kids with a nice rambunctious kid’s museum………..