over the river and through the woods: the first evening

took a road trip this past weekend. wasn't enough to take my three kids on a 9+ hour trek to gram's house. nope, decided to invite my niece and nephew along for the ride as well. i prepared dale as best i could and he assured me he still wanted to go - was excited to go, no less. yea, ok. we'll see how you feel in two days, champion.

got all my ducks in a row, motel resies made, clothes washed and packed, phone calls made warning folks that it hadn't been the nightmare of all nightmares, i really was going to show up and it really would be loud. i picked the kids up from school on friday afternoon and waited for d to arrive so we could take off. i had made plans with the disney guy to take care of the pup while we were gone (i wasted calling in a marker on that, dammit, but more on that some other time), because, where i may be a bit off, i'm not completely stoopit - i did not want to deal with her on top of everything else, plus she takes up a lot of room. and she has gas. eye-bleeding horrible gas. truly, i get enough of that from my kids.

we arrived in the lurvely town of anderson, CA (where we would pick up the extra two mouths to feed) at around midnight after an uneventful 5 hour drive. i had made a reservation (using a 2001 AAA travel book, silly me) at a two-star (read: cheap, but not necessarily life-threatening) motel that had advertised a free continental breakfast. we checked into our room which, while being a tad sparse, seemed clean enough for our hamburger-helper tastes. we did find out the next morning that either the AAA book flat out lied or something had definitely changed because the "free continental breakfast" consisted of some lukewarm coffee and...well, some sugar for those who prefer to grace their joe with it. in all fairness they did offer some rather greyish looking bananas or nasty lemon-jelly pastries for "each 50 cent". needless to say, we decided to skip this veritable plethora of goodness and went in search of a subway. now in the matter of hours that we had been away from home, we had discovered that i forgot my shoes (so me) and my toothbrush. bennett had broken his i-pod earphones and was having a serious freak-out because he couldn't drown out the sounds of his family's incessant breathing in and out, and my niece had decided she really wanted to take up crocheting this weekend (because she knows her aunty shawna can rock a crocheted blanket), but had no hook. or yarn. off to walmart and no shit, they had a subway.

getting about a 2 hour later start than we had hoped for (and therefore, leaving right on time), we started out across the beautiful klamath mountain range in search of snow and eventually, hopefully grandmother's house.