Our son Gregory’s birthday is the 10th of March. Our daughter Polly’s is the day after tomorrow, March 16th. To celebrate, Donna, Polly, and I, accompanied by all three dogs, drove to Las Vegas last Thursday, where we stayed with Greg and our daughter-in-law Beth in Henderson. We got home yesterday, Sunday.
We hadn’t driven to Las Vegas since before Covid. Traffic was heavy coming and going, particularly at chokepoints in Phoenix, Wickenburg, and Kingman. The roads, not just US 93 but I-10 and I-40 as well, are considerably more beat up than they were in 2019. Gas stations were mobbed everywhere. But we made it up and back without incident. Best of all, the new dogs traveled well (if you don’t count the huge shits they took on Greg & Beth’s floor as soon as we got there).
We think our kids had good birthdays. They don’t get to see one another that often and had a good time catching up. Our grandkids were in town, Quentin down from Dixie University in Utah for the weekend, Taylor popping in after work on Friday and Saturday. Since our whole nuclear family would be together, a rare event, I brought along the good camera and tripod, and we took family photos in a nearby park Saturday afternoon.
I think our family portrait gives off a Sopranos vibe, thanks particularly to our boy Tony, er, Greg, in the middle.
Poor Mister B, our elder dachshund, took a tumble coming down the stairs at Greg and Beth’s and spent most of the visit cured up in their dog Piper’s bed, getting up only to eat and hobble out back to relieve himself. He napped all the way home and is still limping around. It’s almost as if he broke a rib or something … if he were human, that’s exactly what we’d say is wrong with him. About all we can do is let him rest and give him a baby aspirin for the pain once a day. Poor old guy!
Here are all three doggies, tied to a fence at a roadside rest area outside Wickenberg, Arizona, where we stopped on the way home to eat lunch. We stopped at a different park there on the way up, but there was no stanchion to tie the dogs to and we had to eat with one hand while holding their leashes in the other, no fun for them or us.
As always, happy to be home, sorry we don’t live closer to both our kids … but really, 400 miles isn’t that far and as far as that goes we’re more fortunate than most families.