Vaca 2021, Day 15, The Final Day

After the Hell's Revenge ATV tour last night, we all got out the clothes that we would be wearing for tomorrow and packed the van up, one final time.  I finished writing in my journal while finishing up the two beers that I had in the fridge.  It's late and we had to be up early!  

This is how our day started.  We were up EARLY so that we could be to the meeting place for our hot air balloon tour over Arches National Park at something like 5:15am.  The friggin' coffee places ain't even open yet!  This is standing in the parking lot of a gas station with a large parking area looking towards the East.  You can't see it in the picture, but the sunrise was shining thru one of the arches on that far mountain slope.  Pretty cool.

Wait, what???  We're on the road again?  What happened to the amazing balloon pictures?  Well, by golly, they were not to be.  They have a 'sighter' who goes out even earlier to the launch site and measures the wind and monitors other "things".  We were in the van on the way to the sight when that cat came over the cb radio (yeah, that's right!) and said "Too windy.  No launches this morning.".   So the van whipped an illegal U'turn (not much traffic at this hour) and took us back to our cars.  Honestly, none of us were upset about it as sure, it would have been cool to do, but we are all fried as this is day 15 of vacation and frankly, we all want to get back home.  Get back home and see some dogs!

So now, we're somewhat hellbent... wait, is that possible?  Is it possible to be 'somewhat hellbent'?  It seems that you would either be hellbent or not hellbent... doesn't seem like a lot of middle ground here.  I'm going to say that we're now hellbent on making it home today since we have an extra 4 hours to burn since we get no balloon ride.  That map is from our rental to our home, door to door, 1034 miles without accounting for gas and food stops.  I believe that my math at that time added up to 1055 miles by the time we got home.

I have no idea where a lot of these were taken.  Somewhere between Moab, UT and Pleasant Hill, IA.  How's that?  I think that Caleb was driving at this point as he hauled us out of the balloon parking lot onto Hwy 191 and once he got on I70, it was 80 mph for his first interstate driving.  He liked it WWWWAAAAYYYYYY too much!!!

The roads still look pretty well maintained so I'm guessing this is still in UT because when we crossed the state line into Colorado, the roads went to pot on us!  You'd think with all of that tourism money, they'd have some level of highway maintenence, but the roads themselves say otherwise.

This looks like Colorado now, but the roads still appear decent... hmmm?

The selfie queen and most excellent vaca planner on earth!

 And that's a wrap.  I didn't think there was much purpose in taking pictures after Colorado as we've all driven across Nebraska and, well...  I was driving again soon after this and would drive until about halfway thru Nebraska where Rob brought us the rest of the way home.  It was a long day of driving and we all had sore butts and low backs when we hit our driveway, but, WE'RE HOME!!!

Until next year...  Cya