Christmas in July

(While I am preparing the post about our most recent July trip to California, I thought I would whet your appetites with the story of our Christmas journey, a mammoth post that I have been adding to a little bit at a time as I think about it. It's nice to look at snow pictures when it's 105 degrees outside.)
Prologue
Travel to the past back to our Christmas journey. So the trip, in our minds at least, started much earlier than Christmas as we prepared for the drive. We decided to drive because with our respective families living about 5 hours apart, there is no way that is cheaper and quicker and less painless to get between their homes than to drive ourselves. Flying and then renting a car would be a lot of money, compounded by the big cha-ching of putting Minerva in a kennel for almost two weeks while we were gone and there'd be nothing leftover to buy Christmas presents. Then with the huge amount of snow we got right before Christmas (biggest snow in 40-odd years or so) flights were getting canceled left, right, and center, so we were glad we hadn't planned on flying out of Portland. But driving down meant a lot of things: 15 hours in the car with a baby, trying to cram three people and a dog into my little compact car, and oh, yeah, the weather around this time of year. Many people know that a Bay Area family driving home from Oregon actually got trapped in the snow a few years ago, so with the spectre of their disastrous trip hanging over my head, I wanted to make sure we overplanned for our own holiday journey. We bought a cargo box for my roof rack and a GPS navigator. We packed a small shovel, ice scraper and snow chains, plus extra hats, coats and gloves. I packed a giant road trip snacks bag with nonperishables and a cooler for drinks (plenty of snow to keep those cold). We had blankets, flashlights, mirrors, breast pump...we practically took the space heater and a generator to make sure there would be no dramatic Lifetime movie in our future called "There's No Place Like Snow for the Holidays."
We started a list of things to remember to bring about two months ahead of time, and every time we remembered something to bring (camera batteries, bath chair for baby, Minerva's dog dishes) we would add to the list. We had our "to-dos" for the week ahead of time and got everything done, including Andy changing the oil for the car at about 7:30 at night, in the dark, on the driveway covered in at least eight inches of ice and snow. After getting everything loaded, Andy and I looked around the car stuffed to the gills and pondered what the heck we were thinking ever even debating about buying the rooftop cargo box...there's no way we would have been able to do the trip without it. I don't think that Mazda intended the compact Protegé hatchback to be used as an RV-slash-moving van. It's a hatchback, not a full-size wagon, so Minerva is luckily petite enough to just barely fit comfortably into the wayback of the car, and we put her fluffy bed and bag of food back there. Then we realized that our overnight duffel needed to go back there, so we squeezed it in as her pillow. We continued to gradually encroach upon her space until, on the drive home, she was squashed back there with two bags, pillow, The Club, two dremels, the snow chains and a box full of picture frames. Don't worry, she could still get up and turn around.
Day 1
Okay, so the plan. The plan was to drive in the afternoon/evening on the first day, Dec 23, after Andy left work early and get down to Medford (Southern Oregon close to the CA border, but before you get to the Siskiyou Pass) and spend the night there in a hotel--5-ish hours of driving. Then we get up on Christmas Eve, get across the Siskiyou Pass, and cruise down to Andy's parents (Grammy and Grandpa Rhyne) in Sacramento to stay the night there--5-ish hours of driving. Then we get up early Christmas morning, book it down to my parents & sibs in Santa Maria, and we're opening presents before it gets too late--and you guessed it: 5-ish hours of driving. So three days, five hours of driving each day, plenty of time to stop for the baby's comfort, feeding, diaper changes, etc. We arranged the gear in the car so that one person could always be riding in the back with Alton to keep him entertained, with the intention that this would mainly be Andy since I get carsick when I'm not riding up front.

The best laid plans...turn into treacherous ice ruts that make the state department of transportation close the highway during rush hour. They say that ODOT's tough decision to close southbound I-5 in the smack middle of rush hour made national news as a "What the #%^*, guys?", but our beef with this move was not that the highway was closed, but that it was simply shut down, with no detours, no explanations, no cops or state troopers out guiding traffic.

We had left our house with chains on the car, the foot of snow and ice from the weekend making slow going on the slick, slippery roads. It took us more than an hour to go the 10 or so miles to I-5, so we'd barely made it out of the neighboring town when Alton was squawking his need for a break. We stopped off in a parking lot, elected to remove the chains and gave baby and dog their piddle breaks. Back on the highway at a whopping 5MPH for another 45 minutes when Alton had once again had enough. As we exited the highway, we noticed that the onramp to I-5S (the freeway we'd just left) was blocked by a state trooper's vehicle and a line of cars waited to get on. Assuming there must be an accident, we headed off to a McDonald's for another round of diaper changes and feeding before attempting to get back on the highway. We assumed that if an accident blocked the Southbound onramp, we'd just head Northbound and double back, right?
We turned onto the major cross street that would take us to the freeway onramp and just stopped cold (no pun intended). We were on the inside lane of a two-lane road, just sitting still while we watched the traffic light up ahead change from green, to yellow, to red without any cars moving at all. The cars ahead of us started to move--yay!--until we realized that this was because someone in a Bronco had four-wheeled it over the center divide and was now heading in the opposite direction back into town. A quick glance at our GPS told us that directly to the south of us the Willamette River crossed perpendicular to the highway, so even if we had been able to find our way around town there would be no telling how far east or west we would have to go to find a road that crossed over the river and would lead us back to I-5. So...we were stuck.
Down in Santa Maria, the Carnine fam had been keeping vigil with rosaries (in Pam's case) and Internet traffic alerts (in Steve's case). In the car we had Andy's iPhone to check the traffic site, but it had no new information (apparently their 'Net guy only works Tuesdays and Thursdays or something) and so it was time to call in the broadband support. We called the Carnine Casa and my Mom answered the phone.
Me: "Is Dad there?"
Mom: "No, not right now."
Me: "Okay, we need you to look up online to see if there's any additional traffic information about this area--Wilsonville Road in Wilsonville--because we're looking it up on the iPhone and we aren't seeing anything new and we don't know what's going on and we're just stuck here on the road. We're thinking that maybe if ODOT hasn't posted anything new, a local news station might be covering an accident or something, so maybe they would have something up on their site."
Mom: "Hmm. I think...your Dad left the traffic website up...on the computer...and I can go look at it...."
Me: "Um, Mom? Is there, um, anyone else there right now? Like Cari? Because this is kind of Defcon 5 here--we don't know what sites to look at and we need someone to do some quick researching around."
Mom: "Okay. Yeah, KC is here."
A quick conversation with KC and we were hunched over the phone while he clicked away on his laptop hundreds of miles away, with the sky around us rapidly approaching complete darkness and our Odometer rapidly approaching a big fat .001 miles traveled in the last 30 minutes. Finally KC spoke.
KC: "Try 1640 AM."
Me: "Oh, a radio station? I didn't think of that. (Andy tuning dial to 1640AM.) Can you also check on a local television news station? We were just thinking that they might have someone out at the scene of the accident covering it to tell us what's going on and when they might be able to open the onramp again."
Radio: "...static...You're listening!...static...to RADIO DISNEY!!!!"
Hmm, maybe not. KC went back to the virtual drawing board and found some tiny mention on a blogger's site about the current traffic predicament: Due to unsafe road conditions, the southbound highway was closed, as were the onramps. ODOT would reopen the onramps on a rolling basis "as conditions improve." Dad also made it home at this point and found the same dismal news every place he checked. So our options at this point were to a) sit in the traffic, not moving, for goodness' knows how long and hope that the highway would reopen in a reasonable amount of time, or b) head for home, which would take a couple of hours and would leave our "miles traveled" marker for the day at a big fat ZERO. We opted for Option A and it was terrible. We moved about one city block in almost three hours.
At one point Alton had really had enough and I had to quell my overcautiousness and remove him from the car seat, but of course in doing this caught a whiff of poo. And how exactly do you change a poopy diaper in the dark and freezing cold in a car "parked" in dead-stopped traffic on an icy road? I elected to grab the baby and diaper bag and cross the street to a nearby Wendy's to use their bathroom. I had the cellphone handy in case traffic miraculously began to move and Andy had to brush the cobwebs off the gas pedal to inch the car forward. It was the fastest diaper change ever and I trudged back through the 10-inch snow drifts to the car, which had moved exactly 0mm since I had left it. We ate some road trip snack food (man, if we had known what was in store for us we would have stocked up on Big Macs at the Mickey D's when first we stopped) and waited, hoping that we would get on the highway with at least enough time to drive down to Eugene (we had long ago realized we'd have to forfeit our hotel reservation in Medford), a sorta halfway point of Oregon.
They finally let us back on the highway around 9pm (remember we left our house at 1:30pm), but although the roads had been plowed they were still not safe to drive on at more than 20-25 MPH, so we rolled onward slowly. We passed by the Woodburn outlets and I recalled how, when I went shopping there with Mom and Cari, they were less than an hour from our house in Hillsboro. Gulp.
We hit Salem around 11pm and decided to call it a night. Salem is about 60 miles from our house, and it took us about 10 hours to get there. We played a little Mary and Joseph skit, no-room-at-the-inn style, when it took three tries for us to find a hotel that accepted dogs and didn't charge you $100 to do it. We fell exhausted into our king bed and got up at 7am to do it all again.

Day 2
Day Two was actually not so bad, except for the fact that we had to do two days' worth of driving (minus the incredible 60 miles we'd traveled the day before) in one day. We got our early start and once we were out of Salem the snow was pretty much gone and the roads were clear. I took my turn at the wheel just north of Eugene and was able to marvel at how beautiful Oregon is. Everything is very green, and the grey day cast the scenery into perfect, clear focus, the better to see miles of mountains, farmland and trees, trees, trees. We traveled for awhile in an uneventful drizzle that appeared to be manipulated by computer-generated special effects as I watched the flying drops slowly turn to solid snowflakes. Alton slept peacefully as Andy and I monitored how the snow piles on the side of the road seemed to increase in size the farther south we drove. We exchanged nervous glances in the rearview mirror as I tightly gripped the wheel and we neared the (dun, dun, DUN) Siskiyou Pass. Much of our progress for the rest of the day would hinge on the Pass being open, because if it was closed then our southbound traffic would get diverted to the coast via windy mountain roads that gave my mom grey hairs just to think of them. As it turned out, we needn't have worried. The valley just north of the Pass was not very snowy and barely even cold, and the pass itself was much shorter than we thought it would be. We drove with our noses figuratively pressed to the windows, peering into the white gloom for our first glimpse of sunny California, where it's shorts and flip flops all year round. We exclaimed when we saw the "Entering California" road sign, and amazingly as soon as we got down to the valley in Yreka the snow was gone, the sun was out, and we rummaged through our car for sunglasses and happily munched on snacks while we gloated about what a breeze the rest of our trip would be. A gas stop in Weed (famous for this road sign) had us backpedaling as hail and icy wind whipped through our sweatshirts and then turned to sleety rain on our way down to Redding. It continued to bucket all the way to Sacramento, where Grammy and Grandpa Rhyne reside, but we pushed onward at all costs. Many of you know of our adamant house rule that Alton does not watch any TV at all, but even this ironclad law was broken as we neared our destination. On the pitch-black highway with deafening rain pelting the car, Alton had run out of patience for the carseat and, taking my turn as the in-flight entertainment, I had no light with which to amuse him. So I caved, pulled out Andy's laptop, and switched on Finding Nemo for an agog Alton, who spent a happy 15 minutes watching fishies swim back and forth (sound was useless on the laptop's crappy speakers) before getting to Chez Rhyne, where we made sure to feed him lots of fish oil capsules and read aloud from the encyclopedia to counterbalance the dulling effect of television on his brain. Okay, maybe I'm kidding. But we were welcomed by Grammy and Grandpa with open arms to wind down before bed. What a Christmas Eve that was!

Day 3
Ah, Christmas morning, and by far our easiest day of travel so far! The morning was a little overcast and rainy, but we got all packed up, led a weary Minerva to the car and coaxed Alton into his car seat again (although he got his revenge: a gigantic doo doo just after we had stopped for gas a couple exits down the highway, so we had to change his grand stinkiness on the backseat in the empty parking lot of a Petco since nothing was open) and hit the road. Alton had his Christmas bib on from Nonna and Papa Carnine (it was hard to find a Baby's 1st Christmas shirt for a 12 month old! I guess they figure if you are almost 1 year old, you have already had your first Christmas?) and conked out only about 30 minutes into our drive. I persuaded Andy to go to sleep as well, since being a passenger in a car is to him like the rest of us dining on turkey and Tylenol PM with a warm milk chaser. The day before while trying to soothe Alton to sleep, Andy was starting to doze off in between verses of "Twinkle, twinkle, little star": "How I wonder...mmm...what...you aaahhhZZZZZZZZZZ." So while I am driving we employ the rule that Andy sleeps when the baby sleeps so that he isn't falling down on the job of in-flight entertainment. The bright spot in our long drive from Sacramento to Santa Maria (other than arriving in the loving arms of our family at the end of our journey, of course!) was meeting Paul and Christa at the Gonzalez McDonald's at midday! The Dynamic Duo had exactly the opposite Christmas Day plans from us, and were driving from Santa Maria northward to Sac to spend time with Paul's family that day. We had half-jokingly tossed out the idea of meeting somewhere on the highway as we passed like ships in the night, but little did we know that we would be able to rendezvous in Gonzalez, favorite small town rest stop of all Bay Area-bound Santa Marians! (First choice: Dairy Queen, always, but they were closed on Christmas Day.) P and C pulled into the parking lot within 60 seconds of us and our brief reunion commenced! Minerva was far too busy sniffing every blade of grass on the median, so all the attention was focused on Alton, who posed affably for pictures and allowed himself to be passed from person to person as well. I'm certain I saw Christa taking deep whiffs of Alton's sweet, clean baby scent, and Paul seemed to relish the opportunity to chat with Altie man to man, since the youngest generation in his family is all girls. But the clock was ticking away, so too soon we had to load up our tired selves in the respective cars and head off to points North and South. The rest of our drive was happily uneventful. We had loaded up the iPod with library CDs of favorite kid songs (radio? who needs a radio?), so we blasted the tunes and kept Alton interested in such oldie-but-goodies as "On Top Of Spaghetti," "I Told the Witch Doctor I Was In Love With You," and Elmo singing "Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay." Listen if you dare. We got to Santa Maria and the family waited, oh, tens of minutes before the great present unwrapping commenced, and Alton found himself embroiled in a sea of duplos, puzzle pieces, and cute clothes.
Epilogue
After many days of fun with family, we drove our tired selves to Oregon. The snow was almost completely gone for most of the drive, so we basked in sparkling, tree-filled country as we wended our way up I-5. We drove past scenic rivers and gorgeous mountains and I reflected about the road to our new home. Despite the fact that we were traveling on a major West Coast thoroughfare, people are surprisingly considerate and deferential to other drivers. It's something that you notice right away driving in Oregon as opposed to California, a state that I love for many things, though none of those are related to driving etiquette. It was obvious that the closer we got to the Bay Area, the more other drivers were exasperatedly passing us no matter what speed we were going, and I guessed that the reason was the out of state license plate; it was just assumed that we would be slower. And I suppose that's fair, since most of Oregon doesn't have speed limits higher than 65 mph, and in most major cities it's still only 50. There are some more sparsely-populated stretches near the CA border that go up to a 70 mph speed limit, at which point the Oregonians strap on their protective helmets to prevent the G-forces from melting the skin on their faces off. Slower pace of life = slower speed limits, but I'm really okay with that. We're proud and happy to have made a home for ourselves in this new state and are always happy to come back, even though we miss all the wonderful folks we left behind in California. So I'll close this epic post by saying Happy Holidays to you all, although it's July and we're closer to this year's holiday season than last year's, but hopefully I have inspired us to make plans for 2009!