NerdGirl speaks...: Two more states and a wedding

You may or may not know that I want to see all 50 states and this month, thanks to a trip to attend a college friends wedding, I managed to cross two more states off the list! To add to the adventure factor, a former roommate and I took the California Zephyr from Chicago to Grand Junction which is a 27 hour trip. We did meet some lovely people on the train: on the trip out on the California Zephyr we had lunch in the dining car with Frank & Patty who were headed to California to see one of their kids and on the way back we met a nice couple [we never exchanged names] who were just traveling for fun. I can only hope to be as active as they are when I am retired: couple one likes to go white-water rafting and couple two likes to go distance biking!

I don't know if I would want to take that long of a trip again with someone but I think that I would do okay by myself because I could knit or read and keep myself occupied pretty well but when you travel with someone else that is a long time to try to make sparkling conversation. Plus, occasionally we were subjected to the excruciating conversations of others...the worst of which was the hippie granola missionary man. The sad thing is that I agree with many of the things that he was saying but the two hour proselytizing was just too much for me. Plus the girl that he was talking with kept confusing the words barter and banter. With 19 hours left on the return trip, Holly was wishing for the train to derail so she could get a rental car [granola man overdose!].

Overall, the trip was amazing. I haven't seen Tyson since college and over the years he has gone from occasionally funny to hysterically funny just about ever time he opens his mouth. Brad and Rachel's wedding was beautiful and the reception was a lot of fun. I hadn't met Rachel prior to the wedding but she seems like a tiny bundle of sass which is a perfect foil for Brad. I won't post any photos of their wedding but I will share some of the fun that Tyson, Holly, and I had with the gift. We were completely underwhelmed by the wedding gift wrap at Target so we went with some monkeys in a kick line and a Tyson created gift bag with a bride and groom monkey. It cracked us up but maybe you had to be there...I don't know.

Holly and I pose with the monkey-wrapped gift:

Tyson poses with his creation:

We were on a bit of a mad-cap schedule for this trip and if I make it back to Colorado there are still lots of things that I would like to do and see. I would like to go rafting on the Colorado River and I would like to drive through the mountains between Denver and Grand Junction and get out and explore and hike around. The train did afford a wonderful view but there were definitely places that I would have like to explored. In a three day trip we managed to fit in a rehearsal dinner, a wedding, a reception,