The Matherne Great American Roadtrip- Part 2

We left Dallas after Christmas hopeful for a two day journey to Las Vegas.  We planned to drive from Dallas to Albuquerque on day 1 then from there to Vegas on day 2.  As best planned intentions seem to go that is not quite what happened.  We had beautiful driving weather for day one and really enjoyed our trip to New Mexico.  We got to meet up with some friends from there, the Strongin's that night to get a quick bite to eat.  Kyle told us that she heard snow was coming toward New Mexico so that night we had to check it out.  Sure enough Flagstaff, AZ which is right in the middle of our path to Las Vegas was expecting severe winter weather starting early the next morning.  We decided to play it by ear but when we got to the last town we could to divert from our course Brad made the call to head south to Phoenix.  We were hoping this would only add about 3 hours total to the trip and keep us from encountering winter weather but again we were not quite so lucky.  We should have taken this as a sign...



We entered another separate snowstorm on our way to Phoenix which was made worse by us being on a teeny tiny road leading from the middle of nowhere where we turned off to Phoenix.  We spent a long, long time slowly, and carefully getting through this storm.



Finally though we made it to Phoenix!  The one great perk about going to Phoenix was that we got to stay with our great friends the Hafez's.  As you may recall  Micah and Shaun were born only 9 days apart and have been friends for life!  They were visibly excited to see each other!



They kept doing this thing which was ridiculously cute where they would both crawl over to the push toy and stand up and push it around together, side by side!







Brads favorite saying of the night was "Somehow I woke up and we were 9 hours from Vegas, we drove 10 hours, and we are still 5.5 hours!"  It was a long day but seeing friends and Micheale's homemade chili and hospitality made it a great end to the day.  We took off the next morning and headed up to Vegas again.  This time with beautiful weather and even better views!  It was a gorgeous drive!  When we hit I-40 again (the road we got off of the day before to go south) It was completely closed in and out of Flagstaff!  It looks like we made a very good decision to go to Phoenix which was nice to know since we had to deal with another blizzard on the way!  We managed to get to Vegas early that afternoon and were happy to get to spend the weekend with more great friends from South Carolina, the Hales!  Kara is Micah's self proclaimed best friend so he was obviously very happy to see her and to get to show her everything he could get into at their house.  We had a great time there and look forward to another visit soon!