I'm on the Oregon coast celebrating the up coming nuptuals of one of my besties. We visited the cheese factory and took a two hour walk on the beach. There were tons of times that I thought it would be great if my men were with me but then I think I would be having a completely different sort of fun. About 12 girls are sitting around a big house on the beach chatting, drinking (water for me) and about to eat some pasta with red sauce bottled straight from an Italian Grammy's stove. Perfect!
I was just telling a friend about this third trip (WW #3), could this be synonymous with "world war"? I am most definitely exaggerating, but honestly, for a week after our trip to Victoria BC I sure felt like I'd experienced something similar. Just ask Nick, I was not pleasant to be around. So why in heck did we go? "Why ever not," would have been my answer a few weeks ago. We all have our passports and Nick and I wanted to celebrate our five year anniversary in the city we got engaged. For me it was sort of fun to get back up there and do some comparisons between who we were then to who we are now, or rather, who we were three weeks ago because surely we have learned a thing or two since then making us all together different at this exact moment. My digression back to philosophy class aside; I can safely say we have learned the following about traveling as our current selves:
1. Travel at night
We thought we would experiment with early morning travel. We woke Deven up about an hour earlier than he would have preferred and high tailed it to the anacortes ferry crossing. We made record time, met a cool young family with a little lady five days older than Deven and had a great family breakfast on the ferry. So what's the issue? Travel in the morning got us to Victoria just in time for Deven's mid day nap but we could not check into the hotel until 3...we knew this but didn't really conceptualize what this meant. Given our early wake up and all the fun and excitement of the ferry we ALL needed a nap but instead had to find something we could all get on board with until a dark room sufficient for napping could be had.
We were smart enough to check with the front desk though and give them our contact information; we only had to wait until 1pm.
2. Don't eat ferry food.
All I'm saying is that this lesson was learned the entire weekend.
3. Dine with air conditioning
The weather was fabulous. We didn't miss out on the 80 degree weather in Seattle because it followed us up to BC. It was great but got pretty hot. When dinner time rolled around we decided to be efficient and go where we knew bringing Deven wouldn't be weird. They have the spaghetti factory in Victoria and Deven loves pasta so off we went. We walked in and it seemed like all other families had this exact idea - jam packed. We were going to sit inside to avoid sun exposure but I made the poor executive decision to ask for out door seating because there was no AC in the restaurant and I figured it felt the same outside so why not get to see the sun on its rare visit into our lives. We really just should have gone somewhere different all together. The dinner was so so and it was so hot outside that I think it just added to our tired and grumpy dispositions. Nothing like sweating over some hot pasta!
3. Get a double room when traveling with a baby.
We totally did this but we gave Deven the nice pretty bed room and we got the pull-out couch. Bad decision! This is simply a case of not thinking. This location for nap time was great because Nick and I could drink wine and watch the canoe races that were going on in the bay that day. But really, for night time we should have switched it up. We ended up sleeping in the bedroom of course, which defeated the whole reason for separate rooms Deven woke up when we went to bed which set off a series of wake ups throughout the night adding to our already zombie state.
4. If you feel like going home early, do it.
We had a couple things working against us on this one. First, being "good" travelers we made ferry reservations to avoided any unwanted delays in our weekend away. To come full circle here, because we had chosen to come early Saturday morning rather than late Friday night we had initially thought we wouldn't want to leave as early as the first of only two ferry's would leave, which was 11:30. The next ferry was 5:55...dumb dumb dumb!!!
The hotels check-out was 11am and we did not consider where Deven would take a nap...I tried to have him take an early one...he laughed at me.
By the time we realized our mistake it was too late and we were stuck on the island. I didn't even check if we could have changed our reservations because I just didn't even want to know how easy it may have been...I still don't.
5. Don't park your car in neutral on the big radiation detectors at boarder crossings.
Don't worry, I'm not ending my story with a full car search at 10pm. However, after our 3 hour (1hour delayed) and 1 hour idle in a boarder crossing cage we were waved forward by one of the guards...or were we?? Nope we weren't, but it was too late to move back because our fellow Americans and or Canadian visitors were anxiously riding our bumper to get out asap! We didn't want to pull forward because they weren't ready for us so we just stayed put. The fine member of homeland security informed us however that a few moments longer and we would have likely been flagged for a bomb search due to radiation detected in the truck. I guess all things have radiation but when you sit on a big machine with the job picking up high or abnormal levels bad things can happen. Thankfully, we avoided this, Deven stayed asleep and we were home shortly.
So there you have it...our travel lessons. Not to worry though, its not like we are about to stop. See above, we on our way to Walla Walla as I wright. We did have some great times in 'Canadia': used Deven's passport for the first time, visit to the museum where d played for ever, visit the bench where Nick asked me to marry him, watched awesome rowing races, played with Deven on the Parliament lawn and tons more.
Stay tuned for all our other lessons!!
For this morning's "awake time" we started preparing for check-out time later this evening. It isn't for sure, but we are hoping to get back home to Mr. Sam tonight (thanks Jaymie for house/dog sitting). Deven has found one more of his happy places in his new car seat which is part of the "travel system" (yes i said travel system) that my awesome partner group at JJCo got for Deven! Along with new born clothing and diapers that our guy wont fit into, Nick had to adjust the belt to allow for our big but happy boy!!
Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.
This is Nick and me on our way from Staten Island to Manhattan via ferry. Nick was training for work and I was taking one last free flight before moving on from Alaska Airlines. Our travels I hope are far from over but this is the last one before we had a little something else on our minds. This trip was in early August 2008 and about three months later we found out the Little Johnston (LJ) was on his/her way...
