A Spontaneous Trip


My son walking the trail at Pawnee Buttes.

This past weekend was Mother's Day, and just like I do every year, I planned something fun to do with my kids. More often than not, I pack up a picnic lunch and hit the road for a day trip adventure. This time, I did something similar but different. How so? Well, I pulled a spontaneous trip out of nowhere on Friday morning. Now, taking a spontaneous trip isn't totally out-of-character for me, by any means, but this one was a bit more than my usual spontaneous.

Spurred on by watching my kids' mental health decline from months in isolation, my own doldrums for the same reason, and just being more than ready to get away from it all, even for a brief while, I began some brainstorming. I wanted to take the kids somewhere, but where? Where could we go that would be fun and cheap while still practicing good social distancing? I started thinking about how the kids and I are members of the Highpointer's Club and that got my wheels spinning. After spending a few hours researching online, I decided to take my kids on a weekend road trip to nab Nebraska's high point and Kansas' high point, with a couple of fun stops in between.

Car and hotel rentals are quite cheap right now, as is gas, so it was easy to make this affordable. We headed out on Saturday morning and drove pretty much non-stop until we got to Panorama Point, Nebraska's high point. We then headed south which was directly into the Pawnee Grasslands of Colorado. We stopped there at the Pawnee Buttes and hiked their nearly 6-mile trail. After that, we made it to the hotel early enough to relax and get a good night's rest - as a side note, I picked a hotel in a desolate part of the state with low covid numbers and sprayed the entire room down with disinfectant spray, letting it dry before we brought our stuff in.

The next day, we left bright and early again, making the three-hour drive to Mount Sunflower, Kansas' highest point. After that was a seven-hour drive home where we stopped for gas and a couple of historical markers. We made it home on Sunday around 7 p.m.

We covered a lot of miles in a couple of days, and, for once, we were all happy to be home. We had a wonderful trip that was much-needed. As we walked the trail at Pawnee Buttes, Eva looked at me and said, "Mom, thanks for taking me here. I really needed this."

As we all did, sweetie.

I'll post about the trip in separate posts as there's a lot of neat information and cool photos to share. Until then, have a great week! 






Comments

Popular Posts