on the oregon trail: day 1

This morning, my two sisters, cousin Nate, and I embarked on our great cross-country adventure. We'll be traveling to the Oregon coast to visit Nate's sister Beth.

Before we could leave, though, my car needed to be fixed. On Sunday, the cable that allows my driver's side window to roll up and down broke . . . with the window completely down! My dad took my car to a body shop on Monday, and Gary (whom I would recommend!) had it fixed by 7:30 last night.

I'd told Nate that we would meet at my parents' house at 7:15 a.m. I knew that we wouldn't actually leave by 7:15, but I had no idea we wouldn't make it until 8:15!

In our quest for great coffee, we made our first stop at Barista's in Grand Island. We knew the coffee would be great, so I guess we weren't really searching for great coffee at that point!

We met up with recently married friend Sydney for lunch in Ogallala. This was hopefully one of our only fast food stops on the trip--we want to eat at local places as much as possible.

I had no idea how beautiful Wyoming is! The topography changed practically the instant we crossed the border. I won't post all the pictures here, but I'll put some up on facebook. I said, "Look at how beautiful that is!" about 25 times today.

We had supper in Rawlins, and I'll do a separate post about that later. It was amazing.

Now we're at our hotel, and I'm pretty impressed. Definitely one of the better Super 8s I've stayed in, and the front desk people are really nice. Val was thrilled to discover there's a Starbucks next door.

Tomorrow we'll head to Yellowstone!