My birthday. Among other things. (Huh… editing the entry makes the link not change to a different color any more. I wonder why that is?)

Although I considered the whole trip to be a birthday present, F’zer also got me a very nice card. We packed everything up, checked out, and toodled over to the same restaurant (Old Smokey’s) where we’d had breakfast last year on our way home from New York. They still make spectacularly good coffee. F’zer had their “all you can eat” buckwheat pancakes, and once again, since the pancake is a bit larger than the plate it arrived on, “all you can eat” turned out to be “not quite one whole pancake.” I had eggs, hash browns and toast, and they do a great job with those, too, especially the hash browns, which I think were cooked in butter. At least they tasted like it. Nobody eats diet food while they’re on vacation, right?

And then it was off toward home. We watched the GPS screen scroll through a lot of pretty much nothing. I think I’m going to buy the Garmin “Roads and Recreation” disk next time I see it on eBay for a reasonable price. It was discontinued two years ago, but it says it adds in a lot of rest areas, side roads and so forth to the standard display. That’d sure make it a lot less boring to look at!

Going west is a bit faster than going east, because it’s downhill most of the way (a 7000′ elevation at the Grand Canyon, to not-far-above-sea-level here). We got an earlier start on the trip, too, so we had daylight all the way. Once again, the scenery in Arizona was a lot more interesting than the scenery in California, and we stopped to eat lunch at a restaurant called Juan Pollo in Barstow. It turned out to be part of a small chain, where they prepare slow-roasted rotisserie chicken in several tasty ways. Alas, the nearest one to us is in East LA, where our travels seldom take us, but the food was good enough it might be worth a side trip someday.

And when we got home, the cats were ecstatic to see us. We were pretty darn happy to see them, too, and even more so to see the kids and Girlfriend a bit later that night for my birthday dinner. Vengeant and F’zer both got me great presents, which was a bonus!

So, definitely one of the better weeks of my life, and it came to a great conclusion!

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