With apologies for the unplanned silence en route, we’re glad to announce we’re back at home base now, with The Overland Express Tour of 2011 successfully completed!

For those who like numbers, here are some initial figures that surprised even me:

We travelled 8034 miles.  That includes 97 miles on a tow truck from Gilroy to Modesto, California.  On days when we drove, we averaged 401 miles. If you include the seven days we were at conferences, we still averaged 309 miles a day for the total journey.

We spent 25 nights on the road.  Seven nights were in hotels provided by conferences, six nights were hospitality from other families, ten nights we camped out, and only two nights were in hotels by our own choice.

We visited 16 states — North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Kentucky — and spent the night in 11 of them.

We spoke 28 times in 26 days, in 7 different locations — conferences in North Carolina, Arizona, and California, and one-night visits in Oklahoma, California, Nebraska and Missouri.  We only went three days in a row without speaking somewhere!

And got to experience a tremendous amount of American history and geography — from the Painted Desert and Grand Canyon, to the Golden Gate and Chinatown, to Yosemite and Lake Tahoe, to the Mojave and the Great Plains, and the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte Rivers, the Oregon Trail and Route 66, the Sierras, Rockies, and Great Smoky Mountains, the Bonneville Salt Flats and Great Salt Lake, and so much more.

Can we say thank you to all of you who supported us on this journey, in person, in hospitality, financially, and in prayer?  This was an adventure as great as we had imagined, and an opportunity to minister to hundreds of people across the entire Southwest with encouragement and practical ideas about raising sons and living a biblical family life.

More later … like, when we get our camera back …