Wednesday, December 24, 2008

christmas road trip failure...

Today we were supposed to be finishing up our drive to California. We were supposed to be in Modesto for a week, wake up Christmas morning and celebrate with B's mom, grandpa, and uncle Lee. It was supposed to be super fun, and super special, since it would be the first Christmas we spent in California with the kids. Stupid Weather ruined our plans, but we put up a good fight, only to end in defeat last night... here is the rundown....

When the weather turned bad, we thought hmmm, maybe we should get train tickets? Nope totally sold out, good thing since train service shut down...

soooo... back to the original driving plan...
  • Decided to get a 4wd rental car, our goal was to leave town between noon and 1pm...
  • Getting the rental car should have taken, what, 20 minutes? took 2 hours... ughhh!
  • Left my Mom's house loaded with half our stuff at 2:00pm...
  • Ran down I-205, not really a problem and had to stop at our house... in record time had all presents loaded, snacks packed, and movie started for the boys...
  • 3:00pm hit the road... goal was to make it to Medford to stay with my brother for the night by 9pm, 6 hours gave us plenty of time.
  • 3:15 heard from my sister they would be closing I-5 at 4pm to de-ice the roads, so we needed to be fast.
  • Didn't stop for gas, figured we would make it to I-5 before they closed it down and would stop to get gas than.
  • 4pm sitting on I-205 going 5 miles an hour... sucks...
  • 4:30pm have gone not even a mile...
  • 5:30pm still on I-205 not moving at all...
  • 6:30pm... still sitting, people are out of the cars, trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
  • ...We have only a quarter a tank of gas left...
  • 7:45pm barely moving along, we finally make it to the stafford road exit... we get off of I-205 south, and get right back on I-205 North... we are going home!
  • 4 and a half hours we made it 2.6 miles...
  • It took us 11 minutes to make it back to our exit for home, that was traveling at a high speed of 30mph.
  • We threw in the towel! There are now winter advisories on both sexton and the siskiyou pass, plus a storm is supposed to hit Northern California... we are done. the universe is telling us it is No Go....

after almost 5 hours in the car to only turn around, we decided to go out to dinner (I have no groceries at home, thought we were going to be gone for the week).... we ended up having a very lovely dinner at 8pm at our local sushi-go-round place...


Totally bummed!

1 comments:

Tiffany said...

WOW! That totally sucks! We were looking forward to seeing you guys =( I kinda thought the weather might be an issue though. Hope you have a great X-Mas anyway!