Trip preparations

We have been planning on making a trip up to Washington to visit DH's parents for quite a while now. The last time we were up there was Christmas 2005, so it has been a while. As we were discussing the upcoming trip I thought it might be fun to take a different route up there and stop to see a few sights along the way. At first we discussed driving to see the Redwood trees in northern California. When I looked up on Mapquest the route that it recommended we take, we were surprised to see that it suggested driving partway through Nevada and then heading up north to southern Oregon to get to California. When we saw that and discovered that this route would take us close to Crater Lake, we decided to make 2 stops on our way up to Washington.

One of our dilemmas leading up to the trip was what to do with DH's bike. DH wanted to take his road bike with us so that he could go biking with his dad and brother while we were there. While we could have fit the bike in our minivan between the front seats and the two captains chairs, it makes it hard to get the kids in and out and impossible for DH or I to sit in the back with the kids if we needed to. We had been talking and thinking about what to do with the bike for a couple of weeks leading up to the trip and still hadn't decided on what to do. So on Monday evening (the day before we were leaving on the trip) we finally went to REI and thankfully had a good salesman talk to us and help us in making our decision. We were deciding between a roof rack for the bike and a trunk mount. We finally decided on the roof mount and then went home to try and get our packing done and to figure out how to install the mount to our roof rack.

Unfortunately while we were at the store, Blondie started complaining that her stomach was hurting and I ended up spending most of the night up with her. She kept feeling like she was going to throw up and she was crying on and off because of the pain. I ended up sleeping on the floor next to her bed and wasn't able to get hardly any packing done that I wanted to that night.

Thankfully Blondie was feeling somewhat better the next day, but because I still had a lot of packing to do we weren't able to leave until around noon. (I also got up early on Tuesday to mow the lawn and water my garden and flowers before we left.)