2017 Road Trip

We took a nice long road trip for vacation this year.  Below will be lots of pictures....

We traveled a total of 2723 miles.

Our car reeks of sweat.

 A general idea of everywhere we went.  This doesn't include all of our random side trips...

 Grand Canyon North Rim.

 Marble Canyon.

 South Rim (still a novice at using a fancy camera, sorry, not sorry.)

South Rim

South Rim with humans

 Meteor Crater (definitely not worth the money)

With Cody at Meow Wolf, a very cool place.

 Meow Wolf (Santa Fe)

Sandia Peak

 Sandia Peak

Nuclear Science and History Museum

White Sands

 White Sands

 White Sands

 Instagram fancy picture of White Sands

 Bowling the Moon

 Jumping the moon

 It was not cool there.  We were sweaty all night.

 Sunrise meant we could leave, because they open the gates!

 Carlsbad Caverns.

 Carlsbad Caverns.  This is the remains of a 90 foot ladder back in the early 1900's when they were exploring this place.  Imagine swinging on this in almost total darkness...

Pagosa Springs

Pagosa Springs 

 Mesa Verde is all burned up on top.

 But the homes are still intact and cool.

 The tours involved small spaces/crawling, and large ladders on the cliff.  I hate heights.

 Fiery Furnace.  We took lots of pictures to make sure we wouldn't get lost.  Can you see the small arrow we're supposed to locate?  (Jake is pointing to where we came from, in case we need to back track.  The Ranger had very little faith in us figuring it out...But we did it!  Proved that man wrong!)

 The prayer rock? High five?

 Delicate Arch.  

Storytime: The Unicorns

I have not written anything in a LONG time.  I haven't even written a single post about Jake.  Well, for those of you who have no idea about my life, since my last post, I met Jake in February 2016, married him in February 2017, and now it's been six months since we've been married.  We have a tradition: every night, one of us has to tell a story (we alternate every day).  We like to remember silly stories we told each other (especially when we're tired).  However, many of these stories are already lost to memory.  Therefore, I will try to chronicle them here, for us, when we grow old and senile.  There will be grammatical errors, made up words, and inconsistencies.  All raw stories tend to have flaws...

The Unicorns

This story is the story of the unicorns.  As told by Natalie.  The listener, Jake, drew this picture as he listened.

I'm sure you've looked many animals on this planet, and thought, "hey, that's cool!"  Or you noticed that something is missing: the unicorn.  I'll tell you why the unicorns are missing (even though they are the national animal of Scotland).

Long ago, there were no animals on the planet.  The people who lived during that time were incredibly bored: there were no dogs to play with, no horses to ride, no lions to run from.  So the people decided to create animals.  They created hundreds of thousands of molds of animals.  There were two of each kind, so they wouldn't have to make them over and over (the animals would reproduce).  There were all kinds of molds, beautiful molds of elaborate horses, dogs, colorful birds, (and of course, unicorns).  There were grotesque molds, such as the banana spider, slugs, and fish that look like poop.

The people went looking for spirits to put inside these molds and make them come alive.  They went to Spirit Land and asked different spirits to come and be different animals.  The world became more interesting.

One week, the people found the perfect two spirits to be unicorns.  But alas!  Some jealous animal saw the unicorn molds and smashed them to smithereens!  So the two noble spirits told the people they would be ok with a different shape.  But nothing was left.  Just leftover rejected body parts here and there.

The unicorn spirits asked the people to put whatever they had together, and they would be happy to frolic around on this earth.  The people found two leftover otter bodies.  They found eight webbed feet.  They found two beaver tails.  They found two duck bills.  They also found something rather cool: two spurs.  They smashed all these things together, and created what we call a platypus.  The unicorn spirits were pleased.  Sure, it wasn't as beautiful as a unicorn body, but you have to admit: the platypus is pretty awesome.  The boy unicorn got the spurs, which released a powerful venom if needed.

And that is why the platypus secretly has the charm and powers of unicorns.