Because I’m not going to be able to travel to Iowa this year for Christmas, my family sent me a package with photos, pictures and memories to open each day this month. I opened my first one this morning and it was the perfect way to start the month. This is a copy of a postcard from my mom to a close family friend about the last trip I took with my parents. They drove to Laredo to pick me up and see where I was working and living over my spring break. We drove along the Rio Grande to El Paso and spent the night near Big Bend National Park in West Texas. Dad had told Mom and I we could do and see anything we wanted so I found some crazy out of the way and strange places to visit. That first night we stayed in Terlingua, TX which is an old ghost town left over from mining activities. That was likely the strangest hotel I have ever stayed in ever but it was a lot of fun. The drive to Terlingua was interesting as well. We were stopped multiple times by border patrol which I was used to after living in South Texas. My mom, however, was well on her way to getting arrested for mouthing off to federal officers by our third or fourth stop that day.

The postcard and image here is from another ghost town, Oatman, Arizona. I chose this ghost town to visit because of the donkeys that wander all over town, in and out of the local businesses. While Dad and I were out shopping and visiting different places around town, Mom was entertained by the donkeys. She had a cookie on the dash that this donkey really wanted to share. Mom wasn’t wrong about the number of ‘rocks’ we had seen on the trip either. By the time we were in Oatman, AZ, we were near the end of the trip for me. From there, we went to Las Vegas for a couple of days and then I flew home and they headed north to Utah to finish Mom’s visits to all of the US states except Hawaii.