For my birthday I got tickets to Wicked. It was over-priced and instantly sold out in Salt Lake, fortunately, we had an old college friend, Aaron Cali, offer to get us tickets to see it in Denver with his family. The show was Wiz-tacular, I mean spectacular. I loved, loved, LOVED it! I really hope it comes to Salt Lake again so we can take our girls-they would thoroughly enjoy it!
After we got tickets we initially thought of flying, but the call of the open road over-ruled that notion (that and the fact that I hate rental cars-it's weird and I've never admitted it aloud to ANYONE...but there it is).
Now I want there to be no misunderstanding, I love my kids, and I love taking my kids on vacation. But there are a couple perks to leaving them home with Grandma (and after hearing the reports of all the fun they had with Grandma, I think they had a better Fall Break than if I had stayed home with them)! Some of obvious joys that are associated with traveling without kids...no fighting, no frequent potty stops (including those that take place along the highway), and there was no dreaded question "are we there yet?". I didn't miss the "stop touching me" conversation...not once did Rob utter that phrase (I think that sounds dirtier than I meant it, which makes it even funnier).
Some of joys were less obvious. For example: we got to listen to OUR playlist the entire time, no Hannah Montana, Jonahs Brothers, Demi Lavato, or Weird Al on this trip! Or even better was when the radio was off entirely and we were having those "boring grown-up" conversations WITHOUT interruptions! We drove around for quite awhile looking for a restaurant for lunch. I didn't mourn the loss of the usual meal time decision making process... "It's McDonald's...I have to go potty RIGHT NOW...I don't like this place...What toys do they have in the kids meals...I'm STARV
ING TO DEATH".We were able to stop at random places along our way without being asked "what are we doing here?". For example, on our way out we wanted to stop at the Continental Divide. Rob remembered stopping there when he was younger, and it sounded like a great picture spot, so that became our quest. We looked for the signs for 40 minutes. We were flying through the middle of the Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnels, when I spied the sign showing that we
were UNDER the Divide. There is no photo-op in a traffic filed tunnel. It's then that Rob realized his family must have been on Highway 6 not I70. We were not turning around at that point, so instead we took the scenic route on our way home. We hopped out of the car in our short sleeved tee-shirts and got some crazy looks from the people in their snow pants and parkas. We stayed long enough to get a good look around, a picture and watch a kid wimp out of a snowboard jump (we were hoping for some good youtube material since the person who built the jump failed to account for the giant rock at the end of the landing area...maybe that's why the kid wimped out?).We stopped at a Gold Min
e for a tour...hence the sexy hard hat picture. Anything that looked remotely interesting we pulled off the road to explore and 
photograph.We did things my kids would have been bored out of their mind doing. We toured the US Mint, found Buffalo Bill's grave, and walked along the Colorado River. I crunched through the leaves at our hotel, we meandered through the 16th Street Mall and had an eternally long lunch at Chili's (it took so long that Rob had to run 
back to the car to feed the meter before our food even came out...I missed Zach, the BEST Chili's waiter EVER).I had such a great birthday season this year (I say season because the celebrating lasted over several weeks)! Thanks Rob for being such a thoroughly delightful traveling companion. I look forward to our next vacation...whether or not we take kids is still up in the air! Actually, if we did try to leave town sans kids I think we'd be facing a mutiny from either the kids or my Mom! Thanks Mom for entertaining our brood. Thanks Rob for an amazing time...Love you Babe!
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