Chapman

The Chapman’s are road trippin’, baby!  One of Tevor’s companies was flying him down to Florida to train one of their teams, so we decided to make a two week roadtrip of it instead!  We are going to try to blog each day with an update, so stay tuned!  

Trevor was down in California so Jace and I took off at 3am Friday night (or Saturday morning) and drove straight through to Riverside.  Holy toledo– it was a LONG drive.  I usually drive to Las Vegas and play with Trevor’s family and spend the night before completing the journey the next day, but this time it was straight though and we about keeled over from exhaustion.  We got there around 10am Saturday morning and slept until around 3pm and then we loaded up the car, and took off to FLORIDA!

So, usually when we go on vacation, we spend thousands of dollars when it would usually cost a normal three person family like $500.  Some members of our family are what some might call “extravagant”.  I think the perfect hotel accommodation is a cardboard box on the side of the road.  Trevor is only happy in The Grand.  And I literally mean The Grand– that is not a figure of speech.  So this is how you can all see how much Trevor loves me– I bought a blowup mattress to go in the back of the car and begged Trevor to let us sleep on that for some nights of the trip– AND HE CONSENTED!  Is he the sweetest or what?  I got the mattress while he was still in California and I was visiting my family.  I was so excited about it that I tried it out and slept on it in my car for most of the nights at my parents house– hahaha.  It is so comfy!  I love it– I feel so self sufficient like a pioneer!

The first day we just took it easy and drove through Southern California to Joshua Tree National Park.  It was dusk when we got there so we saw as much as we could before the sun set.  That is the coolest place ever!  Trevor was there 10 years earlier with his family– 10 years!!  And now he was there with his wife and child.  Weird!  But we are going to make a trip specifically for Joshua Tree National Park because it is so awesome.  We spent the night in a town outside the park and then the next morning we went to Saguaro National Park in Arizona.  Arizona is SO pretty!  I could not believe how huge all the cacti were and the vast variety.  We tried to find the coolest cactus to get a picture by so we trecked through the wilderness to get to “the one” and realized how lethal that desert really is.  You can not step anywhere without stepping on cactus.  And they go through your shoes and into your feet.  It was quite intense.

When I was a little girl my dad was in the military and we lived on the military base in Sierra Vista, Arizona right on the Mexican/American border.  I barely remember it, and I haven’t been back since we moved from there, until this trip!  We drove straight through!  It was so weird!!!  We didn’t pull off, because I had no idea where anything was that i would have known as a kid, but we got a picture of me by the exit sign hahaha.

After that we went through New Mexico and we were really excited to see all the New Mexicans but they just looked like all the old Mexicans so that wasn’t very exciting.    Then we went through Texas and they have the COOLEST rest stops!  They are all themed and soooooo well maintained.  Oh!  And that morning we took showers at the truck stop.  It is so cool– it is $5 each and they give you a key and then they have all these little bathrooms that have their own shower, vanity, and everything.  Very cool.  So that was super fun, too!

In Arizona I also learned an amazing skill Trevor possesses.  He has the supernatural ability to will the blood from the small of his back to go into the back of his head and build up pressure there which turns him involuntarily into a frog.  It’s simply superhuman.  You MUST ask him to show you sometime.

Today we have just been driving through Texas.  It will be vast expanses of nothingness for hundreds of miles and then BAM there will be a gigantic city WAY bigger than Salt Lake, Las Vegas, or any of the big cities I am used to, and then all of a sudden, nothingness again for hundreds of miles.  Craziness.  

We saw a really bad accident and the guy was being loaded into a Life Flight helicopter when we drove by– everyone pray for him and his family.  Very sad.

Trevor made a bunch of CDs for the trip and we have so many cool new songs that you will all love– we will update all that tomorrow.  All right we will try to keep it up to date now!  Right now we are east of Houston, Texas for the night and we are going to take it easy in Louisiana tomorrow– it will be my first time there so I am super excited.  We didn’t take very many pics, but we did a bunch of videos that we will upload tomorrow.  Until next time– PEACE!