Over the River and through the Siskiyous....

It's 10 pm. The car is packed, the kids are asleep, the dishes are washed, the coffee maker is set to start brewing at 3 am. Everything is in order for our early morning road trip. This is our third time making the 10 hour drive to California. We have it down to a science.

I hope that this trip goes better than our last one. After the last trip, we vowed to never return to California again. Obviously that vow was short lived. It's a hard one to keep considering the number of people we love that live in that God-forsaken place. God-forsaken is a little harsh, but let me tell you what happened last trip, and then you can be the judge.

I know you are all busy with your Christmas preparations, so I will reduce it to a short photo essay.

Our car DID NOT look like this when we embarked on our journey.

Nor did it look like this.
To be honest, I don't have any pictures of our beloved 540i before we drove it to California, but I can tell you it was pristine, as you can see from the parts of the car untouched by the accident.The good news: Jeff was the only person in the car at the time of impact.
The bad news: The car was totaled. The accident happened 12 hours before our vacation ended, and we spend a obscene amount of money on plane tickets so we could all fly home. Not exactly ideal when the reason we drove in the first place was to save money.

But that is in the past and what are the chances of something like that happening again? Wait, don't tell me. I don't want to know.

**Update - As I was falling to sleep I realized the my California readers may not appreciate the good-natured way in which I referred to their state. So I would like to say, ah hem...California has many great features which I love. For example Santa Cruz, the Bay Area, Monterey, the San Francisco 49ers and the Sacramento Kings. My gripe with California lies only in the cars that occupy the roads, and in particular Hwy 99 between Turlock and Elk Grove and the car that ran the red light in Modesto.**