The Picanco Family: Trip to Caliente

This past weekend we went down to Caliente to see my family. My brother Neal is a Senior in High School and on the football team so we decided to go down to Caliente to see him play for the high school Homecoming game. We had a good time visiting with family. On Friday night we watched my little brother play football. It was quite the game. Lincoln (my old high school) won 74-8. Because they were so far ahead, the coach had all the seniors take a turn running the ball. So Neal, who is a lineman (I think, he is the one that tackles people) got to run the ball and ran it for 11 yards. He was so excited and proud of himself.

The next day, all the guys went outside to help with the shed my dad is building. They were up there all morning tightening bolts and stuff. Andrew was the only one brave enough to go up to the roof, so he was up there the majority of the time. While they were doing that, the girls got lots of chatting time. Sunday was a nice relaxing day, going to church in my old homeward and playing games with my family.

Monday was quite the crazy drive. The drive that should have taken us maybe 9 house (with stopping) took us almost 11 hours. First off, we got stopped two different times for road construction. Both times we had to wait for a pilot car. The first time wasn't going to be very long, so I climbed in the back and made sandwiches and we ate those as we drove through the first part of construction. The second time we had to stop and wait for the pilot car was about 5 minutes after that so I sat in the van and nursed Deker while Andrew and Keagan got out and ran/played in the sage brush on the side of the road.

Finally we got through all of that and thought was would have a good drive for the rest of the way home. Well, we were wrong. We were about an hour south of Jackpot, and all of a sudden a police car came flying by us with lights and sirens going. Andrew slowed down a little bit because we weren't sure what was going on. We came around a corner and there were severals cars stopped on the highway. Just up the road a little ways was a car wreck. A Semi was off the road and a SUV type vehicle pulling a Uhaul trailer was off onto the side of the road as well. Then about 2 minutes after we stopped a Life Flight Helicopter came overhead and landed on the highway because there was no other place to land. Also, right off the road it dropped down a few feet and so all we could do was sit in our car and wait. So, all in all, we were stuck there for about 45 minutes. It was quite the long day of being in the car, but I must say both boys did pretty well.

I was a little nervous of how Keagan would do driving since we just got him potty trained. For those of you that have traveled through Nevada know that bathrooms can be far apart, so I had Andrew put the potty chair in the back just in case. Well, on the way down, Keagan said he needed to go potty and there wasn't a bathroom very close, so we pulled off and got out the potty chair. Here is a picture that I thought was kind of fun.