We are having a good Christmas vacation. In order to fully understand the meaning of this you must understand my travel karma. Most of my friends refuse to travel with me. They will meet me at destinations but they will not travel with me. And it is a wise decision on their part. This can best be described by telling you of Christmas vacation 2 years ago.
I set out on the first day to travel. I had about a 15 hour drive to my friend's house. I was prepared. I packed. I medicated (pukey girl was not going to be puking). I had money. I had gas. As I started out on my drive it was raining. And for some reason it did not occur to me that it was raining which good only mean snow as I headed north. Through the mountains. Or maybe it was that I am cocky -- I have lived in snow most of my life. About 5 hours into the drive I realized it was really snowing hard. And I was stressed. And that maybe the safest thing for me to do was to stop at a hotel and wait out the storm. As I made this decision I saw a sign for a hotel at the next exit. I took the exit and found the hotel. In a ditch. There was no way I was going to drive my car down a ditch even for a hotel in a snow storm. I would be stuck for days. So I pulled into the gas station across the road.
I sat debating what to do but in the end... the answer was still the same. I needed to find another hotel. Close by. It was getting worse by the moment. I went into the convenience store and asked for directions to the nearest hotel -- that isn't in a ditch. Why is it that no person that works in a convenience store ever knows directions to any place? It could be right next door and they never know how to get there. Well that is the answer that I got. They had no idea where a hotel was. Luckily there was a fireman in the store and he gave me directions to the nearest hotel. Moral -- stop at the fire station. He pointed me in a direction of the nearest hotel -- which required some back tracking.
We eventually arrived at the hotel and I slid into the parking lot. As I waited for the attendant to give me a room I watched several men pushing many cars around the parking lot into what might be determined to be parking spots. After checking in, they got to push my car into a
Sometime in the middle of the night, as I woke up and freaked out by brushing the cock roaches from my face...then freaking out that I must have brushed them on to Ladybug, I decided I was no longer okay with sharing a room with a million teenage cock roaches. We left the roach motel as soon as it got light out. We slid our way out of the snow bank and out of the parking lot. We inched our way back onto the highway. We weaved our way up the hills, through the mountains, and through the dozens and dozens of abandoned cars. Seriously, cars were everywhere along the road. On the road. Parked. Abandoned. And I wondered ... where did all the people go? Seriously. We were in the middle of no where. Where did the people go when they left their car? It makes no sense.
In stead of going to my friend's house that day I stopped at my aunt's house. I emptied everything on the front lawn and shook until I was sure there were no more bugs in my things. I washed everything. I spent the night.
The adventures did not end there. I ended up with pneumonia that year while I was traveling. I also ended up breaking a toe (and dislocated it) and spending a day in the ER while a nurse tortured me by trying to put it back into the right position. My tires were bald (I was not aware of this) and drove through every snow storm in the area. It snowed even when it wasn't suppose to just because I was driving.
So, it is a good Christmas this year... much better than that year. But I will save those adventures for another blog entry -- mostly because they are not over yet -- still traveling.
Mean Mama
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