Sketch a State: Wyoming

After leaving Salt Lake City, we drove to Cheyenne, Wyoming. We had a delicious steak dinner, since Wyoming is beef country. Then we went to the Cheyenne Botanical Gardens to walk around and spend some time in nature after all those hours in the car.

While sitting and trying to sketch the geese (animals are a constant challenge for me because they move so much!) we met a woman and her two year old daughter. We started chatting, and the little girl wanted to help me draw. At first I tried to get her to draw on the blank back of the page before this goose, but naturally the pencil wandered. I figured it wasn't a very good goose anyway, and the memory that this page brings is better than if she hadn't helped!

Sketch a State: Utah

Our second stop on our road trip was Salt Lake City, Utah.

We stayed with cousins for two nights, and spent a full day exploring Salt Lake City on our own. We walked around Temple Square, and took tours of the Beehive House, 26th floor observation deck of the LDS office building and of the LDS Conference Center. We had lunch in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, and I sat and sketched in the (air conditioned) lobby while Sean took care of some calls.

Weekly Meal Plan 7.27.2014

We're back to "normal" life after our road trip, and that means it's time to get back to meal planning too. Here's what we'll be eating this week:

Sunday: leftovers

Monday: beef and cabbage stir fry

Tuesday: crockpot chickpea stew

Wednesday: caprese salad with salami and prosciutto

Thursday: leftovers

Friday: stuffed summer squash - subbing out the goat cheese for feta from Tuesday's stew, and using our CSA ground pork instead of sausage

Saturday: roast beef and watermelon "carpaccio"

Sketch a State: Nevada

These past few weeks, Sean and I have been on an amazing cross country road trip! Over the next few weeks I'll be blogging about some of the different parts of this trip.

One of my goals for this trip was to stop and take a moment to sketch in every state we visited. It's all part of our all-in-one travel journal, which I'll explain in a bit more detail in another post. Today, I want to start off what I'm calling my "Sketch a State" series with our first stop, Nevada!

The first night of our trip, we stayed in a little ghost town called Unionville. A sweet old lady and her son run a bed and breakfast there, and it was a fun adventure to start off our cross country trip. We took my Civic up a tiny gravel and dust road (poor car was so dusty, you could barely see that it's blue!) and had a wonderful night away from modern civilization.

The sketch above is from our first cabin, overlooking the empty desert valley. Not long after I did this sketch, the well pump bound up and we weren't able to get water in the cabin anymore. We moved to a guest room in the owner's sister's house, and had a different but wonderful evening. The B&B really was astounding in its hospitality.