California

What a busy couple of weeks!  Jake is working in California right now and his last "half" (which is what they call their working cycles) was only five days, so we decided it'd be fun to go with him.  It seemed like the perfect solution: he had to leave Wednesday the 15th, which was the day of my last final of the semester, and he'd be done by that Monday.  He was working in Santa Barbara so we thought it'd be a fun little getaway for us before Christmas and the madness of student teaching.

Boy, was it an adventure!  First of all, fifteen hours in a car with two young kids is the exact opposite of fun.  Thank heavens for Grandma Lilya's portable DVD player!  We got there at about 1:30 in the morning so Jake got about five hours of sleep before he had to be up for work.  The first day was actually pretty fun; we were staying in a little town called Lompoc and the kids and I spent the day exploring the town and drove to the beach (which was about a half hour away).  It was cold and foggy so we didn't swim, but Say got seashells and dug in the sand.

Then it started raining.


And it rained.

And rained.



And when it was done raining,

it rained some more.

If you've been watching the news in the past few weeks, you'll know that California is flooding!  They got more rain than they've seen in a decade-about 18 inches in the span of a week.  Yes, we were there for that!  Being a girl from Idaho, I've seen about five minutes of rain at a time my whole life, so this was completely new to me.  We literally didn't see the sun while we were there.  EVERYTHING was wet and flooded-by the second day the roads in Lompoc were flooding and it just got worse.  The worst part of all was that I was stuck in a tiny hotel room with two kids and no place to go!  We spent a lot of time walking around the few stores in the town, but every time we went in one we got drenched between the car and the building, so we gave that up pretty quickly!

I felt so bad for Sayer.  He was sooo excited for days about going to California.  I tried to make up for it by taking him to McDonald's a few times to play on the toys.  That was about my only indoor option!

 This symbol was on the high chair at McDonald's.  Seriously??? Does it need to be made explicit that using your child in a high chair as a bowling ball is a bad idea?

Such a silly girl!

I had a hard time getting them to sit still long enough to get a good pic!

Notice the parking lot in the background.  If you can't tell, it's got about two inches of standing water.  And it's still raining.

Needless to say, we were all beyond ready to go home!  We thought about stopping in Vegas for a day to play, but decided against it.  For one thing, it was raining there, too, and for another, we just wanted to go home!  It took us a bit longer on the trip home, and since Jake had to work until three the day we left, we stopped for the night in St. George.  We spent about 22 total hours in the car on the way home (LA traffic =YUCK), listened to the same six Phineas and Ferb episodes about thirty times, and about died of boredom-but we made it safe and sound!  Just more reasons to be grateful for Idaho!