John and I decided it was time to go home. We didn’t start the road trip from home and we missed home cooking, Fiona missed her room and her yard, and I missed my closet. Also, we wanted to get home early enough that John could stay home with us before going back to work. So we decided to make a big push from Portland and drive all the way to San Francisco instead of stopping somewhere in between. We played with maps and distances and decided that the easiest (and least insane) thing to do would be to stop in South San Francisco at the hotel that John uses when he travels there for work.
We packed up after breakfast (remember Fiona sitting in her suitcase?) and hit the road around 9:30am. At first the drive was easy and very pretty. Fiona took a nap in the car and we stopped when she woke up, just in time for lunch. As luck would have it, our stop was in a tiny little town called Myrtle Creek. We exited the highway and drive over a bridge before seeing the town. There wasn’t much there, but there was a great coffee shop, Soco Coffee Company, that had my precious Jasmine Green Tea and delicious mochas for John, as well as wifi (we didn’t use it) and wine tasting (didn’t do that either). The two women running it were really nice too. If you are ever on I-5 south and need a rest, I highly recommend this place:
A nice bonus, the bathroom was nice too!
The awnings on this building are painted on. They are not real:
After coffee, we found the local park and ate lunch. Fiona spent about an hour playing in the playground before we got back in the car:
That bottle looks huge, but it was really only 16 ounces maybe.
Not going to lie, it was HOT! John collapsing on a bench:
Then again, we sort of always looks like this ;-)
Peek-a-boo!
A neat covered bridge, right next to the park:
After the park, we drove south south south, through the rest of Oregon and then into Northern California, that was HOT and barren. We stopped in Yrika for gas and gum and to let Fiona stretch her legs, but it was so hot and there was no strip of grass for her to roll around on, so we kept going until we reached Redding.
But first, we made sure Fiona had lots of stuff to entertain her:
A million pictures of Shasta and Lassen from the highway:
We stopped at a Mexican restaurant for dinner. I don’t remember the name, but the food was good and the service was great. Even Fiona liked the waitress, even if she (the waitress) had to wear a ridiculous dirndle-like dress. The manager recommended a park to us so Fiona could run around, but we thought the exit was on I-5 and not another road, so we missed it and continued south until we found a rest area. Fiona ran around and we played ball and went under the table a bunch of times before getting back in the car:
Fiona is a great little car traveler. We didn’t use any sort of electronic devices to keep her occupied, but I did make up a bunch of really silly songs that she still requests now, a month later. I held her hand sometimes, but otherwise, she did great.
We were making good time after Reading and Fiona eventually fell asleep because it was her bedtime, although there was a moment when I thought we might need to just find a roadside hotel because she had difficult, never having had to spend nighttime in the car like that. John and I joked that there would be a big traffic snarl when we reached the bay area, and we were right. There was an accident on the bay bridge, causing all traffic heading into the city to stop. So we decided to go around to the San Mateo Bridge, which was farther than I thought. We took 580 instead of 880 because I did not realize that 880 was shorter, never having gone that way. This little detour probably added about an hour to our drive. Fiona woke up at the toll plaza and I got in the backseat with her so she could hold m hand more easily. She fell asleep again almost instantly.
We reached our hotel at 10:30pm, I think. It was cold and windy and the sprinklers were on, so we thought for a minute that it was raining. Oh the irony! Canada was warm and sunny, and California was cold and windy. True, we were in the Bay Area, whose summer was the coldest winter Mark Twain ever felt, but still. Canada is supposed to be the cold place and California the warm place. Hmm.
We unloaded quickly, set up Fiona’s bed, and went to sleep.
And thus ends our long 13 hour drive with Fiona, who was a champ during the whole thing. I think her vocabulary and singing abilities increased as well, because of spending so much time confined in a small space with her parents.
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