The Road Well Traveled

okay, so i know it has been forever but here is the update on our long trip back home! The map shows how far we've been since april. It is astounding that in the first 5 months we have been married, we have driven over 8600 miles! and still love each other! This was truly meant to be. We've already blogged about a lot of the things that we've done, but here is a bunch of stuff between Maryland and Rexburg. There are a lot of more pictures if you click on the slideshow at the right -->
We had a ton of fun, and took our time with a stop in St. Louis and many gas stations with religious comments on the bathroom stalls. very interesting and kinda funny actually!

We left the ghetto east coast of Laurel, Maryland and started our journey from coast to coast back to Rexburg. We had "some" fun times this summer but were more excited to get back to the west coast where people wont give you the stink face and are friendly. We drove on the 70 back home and got to see some beautiful parts of the country!

First Stop:

Our first stop was in Terre Haute, Indiana. We only stayed the night but it was a super fun night. We decided to camp our way back because Matt had gotten an awesome tent for his birthday. We just stayed at a KOA but turns out we were the only one in a tent...everyone had trailers. Everyone was sitting outside their campers and just watching us as we set up our tent for the night. I wonder what they thought... "look at these youngins trying to set up a tent..so old school" "the cool thing now are campers, what are they thinking!" But we had an awesome relaxing night..we set up a fire and made smores!! they were so good..okay i could only handle one, but that one was so delicious!! the next morning we hit the road again.

Stop 1.5
We made a pit stop in St. Louis, Missouri to see the gateway arch. It was so cool! We walked around the park for a little while, took pictures and checked out the museum. We didn't go up because of the time constraint, and it was a little pricey. The Mississippi river is gross..

Of course we were goofing off.. Big chain holding a boat in place on the river

Side view of the arch


Stop Two:
We stopped the second night in Goodland Kansas right on the Colorado/Kansas border.. or Kanerado.. haha. Not much going on here except a bunch of wild sunflowers. I loved them.

Stop 2.5:
We traveled through Denver and ate some left over ribs from the night before somewhere west of Denver. They were still delicious the next day.

Pretty much the funniest graffiti I've ever seen

Back in the west:
We finally got back to Salt Lake and hung out with matt's family. His uncle Brent took us wakeboarding and we all tried out a little wake surfing. We got it down pretty well!

We also took a trip up to the Kennecott mine. I had never been there so it was a pretty cool!



After a few days in Utah it was back on the road to California! We stopped at the salt flats

My sassy pose.. Matt loves this picture..

(Matt has now taken over the blog)
We stopped in Lovelock NV to get gas. I don't really know why we took this picture.. but we'll always remember Lovelock because chelsea started feeling sick here and it kinda made her stay in CA less fun than it could've been.


CALIFORNIA!
We went in California to visit Chelsea's parents. It was a lot of fun and relaxing a relaxing 5 days near the end of our cross country tour. Most of the time we just hung out at home and ate our weight in whatever Tami cooked for us (which was whatever we wanted pretty much). It's a pretty good life at the Beckman house, except now my suit doesn't fit :). We did get out of the house a little bit though. We went to the beach one day, watched the mariners beat the A's :) and celebrated Chelsea's birthday. As part of her birthday, Chelsea's parents took us out to dinner in Walnut Creek, then to the musical Wicked in San Francisco. IT WAS AMAZING! The singers were awesome, and to me sounded at least as good as the CD if not better. Pretty nice that I got to share in the birthday treatment when it wasn't even my birthday! haha. It was amazing and was the perfect ending to a fun week in Danville.
We also picked up a couch that Chelsea's parents (well, Tami) said we could take off their hangs (Thanks again), and a scooter that was in their shed. Packing those into the truck was not very fun, but we packed it all in and it got here without any problems. Our apartment in Rexburg is on the 3rd floor and hauling that couch up here was quite a feat. It would have been all worth it, except that when we tried to get it passed the turn in our entry.. it wouldn't fit. We were (are) so disappointed! We were looking soo forward to having that couch in our living room. For the time being, however, my cousin Kyle and his wife Alli are the temporary recipient of Mom and Dad's generosity and our hard work. They did trade us a love seat that we are now using and is serving us well.
The scooter on the other hand has not disappointed! We did have to charge the battery so that the electric start would work again, but other than that, it was the best thing thats ever happened to finding a parking spot! Too bad the scooter season is quickly coming to an end. The last time I took it to school, I had to scrape the frost off the seat first. Oh well, I just can't wait till spring so we can cruise around on it again! Thanks again Mom and Dad Beckman! I think we tripled the number of miles on that scooter in the 3 weeks we were riding it.

Tami's beautiful smile!

WICKED!! GAlinda :)

That baby looks like Goldberg from The Mighty Ducks, I was
dying!


It's ok A's fans. You'll beat the M's next time :)

Our new apartment.. Was a little smaller than we
were used to, but it's nice!

Thats the end! Hope you enjoyed it!