road trip - blarg!

This weekend, one of Kim's longtime friends is getting married in Portland, and Kim's in the wedding party and we (me, Brian, Sam, Mom, Dad) were all invited, so we decided to go. I have Monday off, so we thought we'd make a long weekend of it, and have a mini vacation. We also thought, Portland's just right up in Oregon, we'll drive! It's only 10 hours, we'll drive at night so Charli will sleep the whole way.

Ha! This was the most disastrous road trip I've ever had. We actually got underway almost on time - a little after 7pm. Nina brought Charli home at 6pm, we gave her a little bit of food and let her run around a bit while we finished packing the car, and we were off (with a minor delay when I remembered I hadn't printed out any maps and we didn't know where our hotel was).

So, 635 miles! Google said 10 hrs, which sounded pretty reasonable. And we were off. There were three major disasters to this roadtrip:

1) The weather. Didn't account for that. It was fine for a couple of hours at the beginning (which included all kinds of traffic), and fine for a couple of hours at the end, and for the rest of the time, if it wasn't raining, it was snowing. We actually went through 2 areas where chains were mandatory for trucks and cars with trailers (Brian and I completely forgot I-5 goes through mountains. But that won't happen again). Our 10 hour drive took about 12 hours.

2) Charli barfed. I mean, like, EVERYWHERE. This picture makes it look not so bad, but it's after many wet wipes and besides, pictures never look as bad as it looks live. We theorize I made her carsick by trying to build a little tent over her to block out all the passing headlights and such, but whatever it was, she was sleeping and every now and then she'd wake up and cry for a few seconds, and then go back to sleep (or back to quiet, anyway). Sam was in back with her, and after a few hours, she said "Charli stinks." So we pulled into a closed gas station to change her, and when the lights came on, that's when we realized that she had barfed all over, she was all wet, it was all over her bear and her carseat and her pajamas, and it was all red with black bits in it so of course I was freaking out until Sam and Brian explained that she'd been eating blackberries. So we had to hang out at the gas station for a while, changing Charli's pajamas and cleaning off what we could of her bear and the carseat. Thank god I brought a TON of wet wipes. This was around 1:30am, after which Charli didn't go back to sleep for a while. She didn't really sleep very well at all - she woke up too easily and then was too distracted to go back to sleep. She finally got really tired and slept for about the last hour of the drive.

3) Berries. We took a lot of berries with us - as in, a Costco sized thing of blueberries and a Costco sized thing of blackberries. The Costco things didn't fit in our little cooler, so we put them into a big ziploc bag. It was a LOT of berries. Then we ate some of them, and when I went to put them away, the bag hadn't been closed properly, and berries (and smooshed berry juice) spilled out ALL OVER THE BACK OF THE CAR. Probably about 1/2 the bag. Well, I said a 5 dollar word in front of Charli, and I maintain that I should be able to take money out of the swear jar for all the words that I wanted to say, and DESERVED to say, and didn't. That was probably around 4:30am. I spent the next long period of time looking for berries in our cargo and using up a ton more wet wipes.

Those were our three disasters. To offset them, we did have some extremely fortunate things as well. For starters, I got a set of brand new tires the day before we left. My previous set were completely bald, and given the weather that we drove through, the new tires were vital. I can't even imagine what could have happened to us if we went through all that on my old tires. Also, while I was upstairs printing out the maps and Brian and Sam were in the garage just waiting around, Brian just happened to throw our tire chains in the trunk, since they were there and he was there. So when we got to the place where they were stopping every single car on the road to make sure they were carrying chains, we got to go right through. I am regarding Brian in awe again right now, as I type this. Sam brought a good flashlight. This is extremely important if you're going to be digging around your luggage looking for smashed blackberries. We brought a TON of wet wipes. We could probably have the same disasters on the way home, and we wouldn't run out (except for cleaning up the mess after I killed myself). Although Charli didn't sleep well, she didn't fuss much either, which is saying a lot for a 12 hour ride.

We finally got to our hotel a little after 7am, where we have an adjoining room with my parents. Mom came right over and took Charli, and Brian, Sam and I took a 2 hour nap. Charli did not. Then I woke everyone up, and we tried to go out to breakfast at the hotel restaurant, which didn't go so well because that's where Charli finally tried to pass out, which necessitated my coming back early and putting her to bed.

Now Charli is napping, and Brian is cleaning "caked on filth muck" off the carseat bits. At least this hotel has free wireless, so you can all hear about our travails.