Vacationing with the Roops: Christmas Vacation 2012

Are you crazy? That must have been what most people thought when we announced our plans for Christmas. We were going to drive from Huntsville Alabama all the way to the Pacific Ocean and visit as much family as we possibly could along the way. The plan was simple:

Dec 14th: Drive from Huntsville to Fort Worth, TX
Dec 17th: Drive from Fort Worth to Tucson, AZ
Dec 19th: Drive from Tucson to Riverside, CA
Dec 21st: Drive from Riverside to Temecula, CA
Dec 23rd: Drive from Temecula to Tucson
Jan 1st: Drive from Tucson to El Paso, TX
Jan 2nd: Drive from El Paso to Fort Worth
Jan 4th: Drive from Fort Worth to Home

That is approximately 4,300 miles on the road and a rough estimate of 64 hours drive time. That is a lot of time to spend in the car.

But in that time we would be seeing a ton of family. On Stacy's side we would see Grandpa, Grandmama, GG, Aunt Kathy, Uncle Fred, Caden, Katie, & Sarah. On my side, we would see Mom, Dad, Paul, Crystal, Violet, Sarah, Aunt Ann, Grandpa, Aunt Jan, Uncle Tom, Uncle Ken, Aunt Ana, & Jacqueline. And we stopped to see a family that used to go to our Church in Alabama, but has since started North Mesa Baptist Church in Mesa AZ. So for anyone counting that is 21 family members and 6 friends. All in a three week vacation.

Crazy? Maybe, but still we had a lot of fun. And more important than just fun, we were able to visit our family, some of whom we hadn't seen in many years. And that is what this vacation was really about, reconnecting with people who don't often get the chance to see us and making the effort to tell loved ones that we care about them.

But fun was still to be had, and we had no shortage of that. On our vacation we saw: