This summer I was gone for a whole month, traveling the country, literally!
I first went to Houston, Texas to visit my friends Brianne and Steph that I met at BYU. We went and toured the Blue Bell Ice Cream Factory, ate a Mexican resturant, got introduced to green sauce (it is amazing!!! and I miss it!), had some Texas BBQ and enjoyed the humidity(not!), and saw some policemen wearing cowboy hats!
Sorry there are no pictures from this adventure :(
Then I was home for 2 days and my parents and I went to New Mexico for the annual Buxton Family Reunion. We drove the lovely 9 1/2 hours to Albuquerque.
Day 1 of the Reunion
We first drove to the site of where the first atomic bomb was set off. From there we went to Lincoln County, NM and saw where Smokey the Bear was found and the town that Billy the Kid was from. Then we went to Rosewell, NM. There was a space/alien museum, but I skipped that part and walked the 5 blocks to Dairy Queen with some of my aunts and uncles. Let me tell you it was at least 110 degrees outside so it felt like 22 blocks as my uncle puts it! We then went to Carlsbad to watch the bats fly out of the Carlsbad Caverns, it was an amazing sight. However we weren't allowed to take any pictures of it.
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| At the Smokey the Bear Museum |
Day 2
The second day we went to the caverns at Carlsbad and hiked down 750 feet to the main floor. Walked around the "Big Room" as they called it for another mile and that was a small part of the cavern there are several floors that are not allowed for the public to see. It was impressive and I would love to go to that again.
Once we were all out of the cavern we drove to Cloudcroft, NM and stayed in a haunted lodge.
Day 3
We went and visited White Sands National Park. It was tons of white sand dunes everywhere. We got plastic discs and flew down the dunes there. But it was super hot!
Day 4
We went and visited the VLA (Very Large Array) out of Socorro, NM. There wasn't much out there and your could buy some of the satellite dishes for about a million dollars if you wanted to.
Day 5
We drove back to Las Vegas. It was a very long drive again across New Mexico and Arizona.
We were then home for a couple of days and then for the 4th of July we went up to Gunnison, Utah for the 4th of July. While we were up there, a man in the town discovered a tow truck in his parent's backyard and turned it into Mater in honor of the movie Cars 2 that was showing in the theater. So Matt and I went and took pictures by it, because let's be honest we are kids at heart!
Our last trip of our month of adventure was to Portland, Oregon for my cousin's wedding. It was a cool off for us. It only got up to 70 degrees. We were able to go exploring Oregon City, the first city past the Rocky Mountains. We also were able to visit the Portland Temple which is very similar to the Las Vegas Temple. It was a great vacation!
