Life In General: Semi-Sunny-SoCal-Sojourn- Part 1

Our California adventure started early in the morning of March 2. Jeff expertly packed everything into the back of the van (Yay for the new van!!!) while I got the boys ready for the day. By 8:30 we had left the house and by 9:30 we were leaving Tillamook, which was pretty good timing for us (my goal had been to leave Tillamook by 9:00). We were going to jump on I5 in Salem, and we are used to making that 2 hour drive because it is the direction we go when we are going to Sisters.

We stopped at a park in Salem to let the boys run and have a snack. For some silly reason I had decided that I didn't want the boys to do much snacking in the car on this trip because snacking leads to crumbs and spills, which leads to grumpy kids and exasperated parents, so I thought we would just snack whenever we stopped...but that ideal didn't last long. It was freezing cold in Salem, and sprinkling just enough to make the playground we were at no fun. So after a running around in the cold for about 15 minutes we ran back to the car, busted out the snacks, and hit the road. Our goal was to make it to Ashland/Medford before dinner.

Our next stop was a great little park on the south end of Eugene. We LOVED our GPS on this trip. Whenever we were feeling the need to stop we would just have it search for a nearby park and then we would randomly pick one. We had good luck every time finding great little parks not too far off the highways. We ate lunch under a little cabana while it drizzled, chased some geese, played on a play structure, changed Levi's pants after he fell down in some goose poop, then jumped back in the car.

Soon after leaving Eugene we found the sunshine! It was a gorgeous drive from there on south. We made one quick stop on the side of the highway to give Levi some Tylenol because his teeth were causing some pain (poor little guy has two incisors that keep popping up and going back down), but we arrived in Ashland a little after 4 and found my brother's house (he goes to SOU, and lives in a great old house in a beautiful neighborhood near the campus). Uncle Evan took us on a tour of downtown Ashland and to another park, then we all headed up to Medford where we had a great pizza dinner and stayed the night with my Aunt Mary. It was a great first day of travel!

We didn't take many pictures that day, but here are a few pictures of the boys in the car. I was so proud of them for how well they handled being "stuck" in the car. Jeff did the majority of the driving while I played the role of entertainer because he tends to get carsick easily if he has to turn around in his seat and we didn't want that. We sang a lot of songs, did a lot of coloring, read some books, played peek-a-boo and talked A LOT! We had borrowed a portable DVD player from a friend, but didn't use until the 2nd day of travel. I wanted to see how much stamina the boys had for being entertained without a movie (and how long I could last too.) By day 2 I was more than happy to let them watch a movie for an hour or two.

Day two, we got another relatively early start. We left Medford around 9:30, bound for San Francisco. We were going to meet up with Anthony, see his house (a row house in the Sunset district...so cool!), have dinner with him, and then head to a hotel for the night. This hotel had been an area of much debate between Jeff and I because I wanted to get one on the outskirts of town in an easily accessible area because I loath driving around San Francisco. It is one of the most confusing cities I've ever been in, and I've been lost there enough to know. But Jeff thought would should get one near Anthony's place, so we ended up with a hotel just south of him, near the airport. Well, getting the hotel ended up being the easier task...trying to cross the Golden Gate Bridge is where we ran into trouble.

Jeff had never been across the Golden Gate Bridge and really wanted that to be a part of our trip, so we mapped out a course that would take us over the bridge and then to Anthony's house. As we were approaching the bridge around 4:00 (after a smooth, but full day of travel) I was driving, so that Jeff could fully enjoy the bridge. We had started talking about the bridge to the boys when we were still 40 or 50 miles away (Daniel really likes going over bridges), so for the next hour Daniel kept asking, "Where is the bridge? Are we almost there?". When we were finally in sight of the bridge Jeff started taking pictures and Daniel was really excited.

In all of the "excitement" of crossing the Golden Gate Bridge I didn't really pay attention to what our next move would be once we got across the bridge, so it wasn't until after we stopped to pay the $6 toll, and I was accelerating to get back into traffic that I asked Jeff to look at the GPS and see where we were headed. As soon as he looked at it and said the name of exit we were supposed to take, I was driving past it, in the far left lane out of 5 lanes of traffic. So, we used the GPS to get ourselves turned around, and headed back toward the bridge with directions to take the "the last exit before getting on the bridge". Well, guess who missed the exit...again. Traffic had surged out of nowhere, preventing me from getting over into the lane I needed, so we were funneled back onto the bridge. After crossing it at a snails pace and finding an exit on the north side of the bridge, I was getting really frustrated and did not have a clear head, so Jeff jumped in the drivers seat, while I tried to calmly explain to Daniel why we had to cross the bridge for a 3rd time. The boys were REALLY ready to be out of the car by this point. So we crossed the bridge again, paid the $6 again, finally took the right exit, but got stuck behind a city bus while we were trying to find Anthony's house. By the time we parked the car outside his house it was 6:00 PM. To make matters worse, when we took Levi out of his carseat we realized that he had completely soaked through his diaper and his pants were soaked, which explained why he had been so fussy for the last half hour of our drive.

Anthony took us to a great sushi/terriyaki place for dinner, which helped lift our spirits and helped me shake off the frustration of the drive (and Anthony said that it had happened to him, and everyone he knows before). The restaurant was crowded though, and the boys did NOT want to sit still, so we spent most of the dinner trying to keep them from running into the waiters and other customers. We didn't get the hotel until after 9:30, but luckily both the boys transferred from the car up to the room and into their beds without really waking up. I went to bed praying that the next day's drive (an estimated 9-10 hours) would be smooth and safe.

Here are some pictures of our sweet boys being so cute in the car :)