So this past weekend my husband, baby, sister and I all loaded up into a tiny rental car and drove up to Oregon for the first time to attend one of my oldest friend's wedding. We'd spent all week packing and re-packing when the baby had unpacked, gathering supplies and getting worked up to a considerable state of excitement.
On Friday morning we woke up at four, dumped a bunch of snacks and ice into a borrowed ice chest, gathered up the sleepy baby {who wasn't at all happy to be awake so early and not nursing}, and headed on with the dawn on our adventure.
We used a combination of Google maps {sometimes very unreliable}, a book of California maps and my sister's short-cuts from lots of far away airsoft war for the first leg of the journey.
Once the baby had gotten used to the idea of traveling along so early in the morning, she started to enjoy it and reached into her bag of toys several times.
The Navigators are hard at work while I'm just casually taking pictures.
They traded off driving the whole way up.
We saw lots of trees, fruit orchids, crossed a couple rivers, saw lots of cattle and got a little bit mixed up which led to losing some time. But they drove fast so we didn't lose a lot.
One passenger was all smiles, surprisingly.
After passing this hill, we had an on-going debate as to whether Butte is pronounced beute {like Beauty only without the y} or butt, as my husband argued.
It gradually warmed up so we turned the heater off, switched on the A/C and removed some sweaters.
These were roses at a random intersection.
More orchards.
Finally, someone succumbed and fell fast asleep.
While she slept, we had our first glimpse of Mount Shasta.
But we still had a long way to go on our adventure so we knuckled under and passed a box of crackers around along with bottled coffee.
We crossed a lovely river - I can't remember now if it was the Yuba, the Sacramento or the Feather river but it was definitely lovely.
By now, we'd stopped for gas and had gotten a little turned around but then got back on the correct road. We also stopped at a McDonalds for a bathroom break and let the baby stretch her legs. She pranced all through the parking lot and the dewy grass. She put up a small fight when we got her back in the carseat; that would worsen each stop we made. And the drivers switched places.
At another stop, I got to ride up front and honey had the baby.
Luckily for him, she was pretty content chewing on her toothbrush.
When we came to the Shasta Dam area, my sister demanded we take lots of pictures of the bridge in construction,
We also had a lovely diversion in the form of word playing with "Shasta Dam Exit." The results were something like, "Shasta, take the Dam Exit!" Someday a character named Shasta will enter one of my stories just to get yelled at.
And as we traveled, the mountain loomed ever closer.
We had a lunch stop at a random place in or near Eureka called The Purple Plum. While the staff was super friendly, the food was skimpy and lacked flavor. We were pretty disappointed but the baby had fun standing on the bench seat and reorganizing all the crackers and sugar packets.
We passed this interesting rocky mountain thing and tried to get some good pictures.
When we crossed the Oregon/California border, the welcome sign zoomed right past us. Interestingly enough, the was no noticeable welcome sign into California from Oregon. There was a sign saying "Oregon thanks you and hopes you'll come back soon." California's only welcome was a border check similar to the one between Nevada and California. I suppose CA doesn't want us to come back or feel too welcome. *winks*
We passed a town called Hugo which was hilarious since my sister has a character named Hugo. We passed a lot of places with funny names like Cute Street, a town called Talent and Road 65. Apparently they started running out of good names after awhile.
We played several rounds of Mad Libs, listened to lots of music {much to my sister's irritation, no doubt} and stopped for gas two or three more times.
This was my payback for when he filmed me dancing in the car earlier in the day. If I could figure out how to load videos on here and get it to work, I would show you the tape but it's not very good.
Once into Oregon, everything became flat and the drivers changed. Instead of tailgating and rudely cutting you off, everyone just went really slow and clogged up the road.
It started to get a little tense when we hit two o'clock and stopped for a diaper change and leg stretching break for the baby, and we were still a long ways off from our destination. We'd hoped to arrive between three and four in the late afternoon. And we'd been making such good time.
Right around then, we started whizzing by rest areas and convenient little stops which we {I in particular} would later regret. It was hotter now and the A/C wasn't reaching the far back so whenever one of us girls sat there, we got overheated and yelled to turn the A/C back on, while my husband would complain of being frozen.
The baby finally fell asleep again around three and slept for awhile. By then, I really had to pee but we were almost to Salem. I watched anxiously as the mile markers flew by; 37 miles, 24 miles, 19 miles, 10 miles, 7 miles. When we did finally reach Salem, we needed gas and a rest room. We noticed Diary Queen but sped by it and Husband didn't want to turn around due to the congested traffic on the other side. An accident was wrapping up so the intersection we needed was closed and we had to loop around. When we were heading down a little side road, Husband hit the curb at just the right angle and we got a flat tire. It was 4:20 and we were all hot, stressed out and tired. They got the spare tire on in twenty minutes and Baby had a little break from her car seat before we were off again. This was when we discovered the roped off intersection. Who knows? Maybe God gave us the flat tire so we wouldn't be caught in the accident.
They switched drivers and we finally found the road we needed to be on, but we'd lost considerable time and everyone was tense. Studying the map proved to be difficult since we didn't have GPS or internet to check all the street names. And I really, really needed to pee. My back hurt so much from the pressure and the hours of awkward seating. apparently our car was designed for short people in the back, not tall people like me. The driver had mercy on me and pulled over on a shady little back road. When we finally reached our destination, we were hot, tired, sweaty, hungry, super relieved and late. It was around seven.
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