My First Experience With “Real” Mountains
So Gary and I, the kiddos, and Gary’s parents took our first ever family vacation last summer. I know, it’s pretty crazy that we took our first ever vacation and our kids are 6 and 11, but it all goes back to the green stuff that supposedly makes the world go round. It’s also crazy that we had such an adventure and I am just now sitting down to tell you about it 7 months later.
We usually take the kids on day trips during school breaks, but my youngest hadn’t ever even stayed in a motel so this 8 day adventure from Oklahoma to Colorado to Yellowstone was different for us all. I cannot possibly write in one post about all of the new sights, sounds, and thoughts that I processed while taking our road trip. I will save some of that for future posts, but I will begin with some pictures and brief thoughts that I thought you might enjoy.
After living in flat, dry western Oklahoma all my life, I had only dreamed about the things we explored on our drive from Oklahoma to Yellowstone.
The heights of mountains (true mountains, not the hills in southern Oklahoma Gary once laughed at me for calling mountains)
The luscious greenness of all the trees, bushes, and grasses
Can you tell Oklahoma has been in a drought for years? I became obsessed with all the water and the green everywhere we looked.
The clarity of the running water in the river that we stopped to walk in
The point of the whole trip was to spend some quality time as a family and to see things we had never seen before, but the most awesome memory I brought home with me was the feelings I felt when on top of a mountain in Colorado with my children for the first time. We road the lift (my fear of heights and that experience is another story in itself) and when we stepped on the deck on top of the highest mountain for miles around, I had the breath knocked out of me.
When the kids and I reached the top of that mountain, this is the view we had. Awesome, isn’t it? While up there, I thought about how creative God is, how He made all these awesome wonders for us to look at, and even with the way the mountains made me feel so insignificant and minuscule, that same God that made them still loves and cares for me far more than any of the colossal mountains or the millions of trees or even the spectacular wildlife. And that thought and that feeling that fleeted across my mind at that moment was worth all the thousands of miles we made that week. Well, that, and the irreplaceable time I got to spend with my family. But, of course, that will have to wait for another post. 🙂
