June 24 -- Sacramento

So we made it out of Lake Tahoe after the mechanic only took a couple hours to fix the brake lights on Betty, and now we are resting in the comfort of a Best Western in Sacramento. It was a great day, and our spirits are up after deciding on a course of action for the rest of the trip. I had prayed yesterday for peace of mind and wisdom for making our next move, and I think God answered the prayer. We arrived in Sacramento around 3:45 p.m., going straight to the California Railway Museum. Elsa had napped nearly the entire drive, and was happy to wake up in a place where she could run around and be a happy two-year-old. The museum was awesome, even if you are 34 like me though. At one point I realized that I didn't even know where Christi and Elsa were because I was like a little kid reading all the signs and looking through all the trains. It was a really well laid out museum with real trains in the building that you could walk through and guides in each rail car that could answer questions. I was enthralled with how they built the railroad over the Sierra Mountains after having to drive over them.















The remaining plan is to push on to Muir Woods tomorrow morning for our last visit to a national park (a total of seven for the trip), which is just north of San Fran, and then go into Berkeley to stay a couple nights. That way we can finish the trip by eating at Chez Panisse, a famed farm to table restaurant that was the internship home of Decatur's own Billy Allin, who owns Cakes & Ale.

I think we have come to the realization that while a true adventure at times, this vacation was pretty awesome. We saw some amazing sights, met some cool people, and can say in all honesty that at least once in our lives we lived out of a VW camper van while touring some of the best western national parks.

To keep It short, I met some really cool people this morning and had a great chat and feel a lot closer to one of the major goals for the trip (to feel closer to God through experiencing nature) after my chat with them.

We have a lot of stories to share when we get back, and a number of them do include the hardships and setbacks that we encountered, but we also are bringing back some photos that are just mind boggling as a testament of what we saw. And let me say that we saw some things that were pretty enough that if you looked at them too long you might start to cry from a sheer lack of understanding of how the randomness of nature could produce something so magnificent. Given that, maybe we really did fine the Yosemite of John Muir. Maybe it was there all along, despite the crowds and traffic jams. I am pretty sure it is recorded in our photos. I think next time we would like to have more time to ponder some of those sites than we did on this trip, but we witnessed them all the same.

We have left the cathedrals of the sierras behind, but look forward to our final glimpse tomorrow of the nature and wonderment that this area offers. I guess it's aptly named after John Muir. A fitting end to the trip.