Oregon Trip Day 1

We couldn’t avoid it. 8 hours in a car.

To get to our Oregon Beach mansion, we would need to make a long, long drive. With 2 boys, age 8 and 12.

Here’s a quick breakdown. No one was murdered. For all you who bet against that, pay up.

So we packed half the house, lept into the car, and plugged in the flux capacitor –  which doubles as a phone charger – and we were off. Not back to the future. To Lincoln City.

Crossing the border was no problem. The fellow was even friendly. Who knew they hired friendly border guards? No snarky remarks. No nasty looks. No rubber gloves and ‘please bend over, sir’.

However, no sooner had we cleared Seattle than our phones told us we’d used up all our travel data!

WTF?

How? HOW?

Immediately, we shut down everything. All data streams. All GPS. All videos about cats. We had to go dark until we reached a wifi zone.

We took the legendary I-5, and drove like mad, as much as we could. There was lots of traffic. LOTS. At times, we were at a standstill. The Prettiest-girl-in-the-world relieved me when I got too tired, too grumpy or all sleepy-like. She drove about 1/3^rd of the way.

Along the way, we listened to music. I mis-sang the lyrics to pretty much every song. No one wanted me to load up my Sound of Music album and sing along with me.

We ate breakfast at Denny’s and lunch at the Cheesecake Café. The Cheesecake café was outstanding, the Denny’s, less so. Maybe not a big surprise to anyone. We also stopped for lots and lots of pee breaks (small bladders being what they are.)

But someone once said that life is a journey, not a destination.

8 things we saw

• At a Starbucks stop, we saw a guy who loved his mom so much he had her name, birthday (and the day she passed), tattooed on his arm. Kinda cute, right? Here’s a guy who loved his momz. And it may have been cute, if he’d not also had the words “my mom is beautiful”, “I love my mom”, “My mom is amazing”, “Mom’s are the best” and about 20 other tributes to his mom inked into his arm. He also had mom written in a heart, upside down. I kinda suspect Norman Bates would do something like that. I locked the doors when we parked beside him.
• We saw that you could buy a 3D printed miniature of yourself. Being a narcissist, this appealed to me immensely, though I was vaguely surprised that there was not already one made of me. Being old, I was stunned, yet again, at our advances in technology.
• The Cheesecake Factory does not have a Penny in it. This was sad. Every cheesecake factory should. It would be a big selling point. It did, however, have cheesecake. The line was WAY too long for us to get any, though. This was sad.
• There is Big Bang Theory lego. No cheesecake café, though.
• There is Simpsons lego. How freaking cool is that?
• Gun racks. Even in Langley, it’s just not a common sight. Saw a lot of gun stores, too. Same deal. Not so much a common thing here. I wanted to stop and see what $500 would buy. The Youngest was also keen to shoot an Uzi, but the Prettiet-girl-in-the-world gave me the Ukrainian evil-eye so we kept on driving.
• There were some pretty big folk. I mean BIG folks. Now I’m not the skinniest person in the world, but holy hamburgers, batman, there are some people who look like they can barely walk.
• The sky was full of smoke. You could taste it in the air. It burned our eyes. All of Washington and Oregon seemed to be on fire. Yet, the sun lit up the hazy sky with the most beautiful pale red at sunset. Like the sky, too, burned.

It took us about 9-10 hours – maybe a bit longer due to everyone trying to escape the smokey interior of Oregon.

Then we arrived. As we stopped at the grocery store (ok, editor’s note, the ‘grocery store’ may have been a store called the Liquor Outlet), we ran into our first family members. An uncle and aunt.

For the Prettiest-girl-in-the-world and the boys, there were smiles, which (of course) makes total sense since they’re awesome. Me, however, I was given a good looking-over before the uncle came over to shake my hand.

“So you’re the famous Joe we’ve all heard about.” He took my hand. Shook it firmly.

“No, we left him at home,” I said. “It’s just me. Just Joe.”

He laughed.

It was a good start. We now had food. A few things to drink. And we arrived intact.

It was, however, too late to really do anything. We had a quick meet-and-greet with everyone, then it was off to bed.

The real adventure would begin tomorrow.