What were we thinking?

When we decided to drive to Seattle to check our car into storage, I don't think we knew what that actually involved. In 3 days we drove for a total of 27 hours equalling 1,538 miles. The kids, due to bad judgement, had no video games for the whole trip. Believe it or not we did survive, but there were some high points along the trip.

The first day (664 miles, 10 1/2 hours), we made it to Montana. We stayed in Billings Montana. Little did we know that the hotel we chose to stay at was the site of a Troubled Indian Teen Convention (not its actual name, but you get the jist of it). There were teens EVERYWHERE. The pool, the hallways, the parking lot. We grabbed dinner, then went to bed. In the morning I repacked so we didn't have to lug all of our luggage into the next hotel.

Day 2 (526 miles, 9 1/2 hours) The day started off so nicely. An incredible Denny's breakfast, with bottomless cups of coffee. It was warm (okay 24 degrees, but after GF that was warm) and sunny. We were all in a great mood. Until Chris opened his window and it wouldn't go back up, that 24 degree weather felt cold REALLY quick. We stopped to try and fix it ourselves, but in doing that it came off it's track. Duct tape to the rescue. We continued on, watching our sunny weather turn darker as we need the first of our three mountain passes. Sure enough as we started our climb into the mountains it began to snow, and didn't let up the rest of our evening. Lyle did great driving through the snow on the twisty, icy mountain road with me next to him, white knuckled and trying to breathe deeply. We stopped at one point to help a minivan full of teenagers returning from snowboarding. They took a bad turn and ended up against the embankment on their side. We stopped in Idaho.

Day 3 (348 miles, 7 hours) We made it out of Idaho fairly quickly with our destination in mind. Spokane had the Dodge dealer that could fix our window. Two hours and $400 later we were back on our way. The weather held this time and we made it through the mountains with no trouble at all. We made it to our hotel and started planning our next day in Seattle

In the morning we drove into dowtown Seattle. First stop had to be Starbucks before we went on the underground tour. We then made our way over to Pike Place Market (yep, the place they throw the fish). We tasted a new hybrid apple, Jazz apples, which were incredible.

We then walked over to the Space Needle. Despite the fact that it didn't look that far away, it was a heck of a walk from the waterfront to the needle. The kids didn't complain too much tho. The needle was very cool and we took a break at the top (Another starbucks for the adults and italian sodas for Chris & Steph).

After all that walking we just wanted Dinner and some time in the hot tub. All in all it was a pretty decent trip. Tomorrow morning bright and early we will be on our way to Japan. I will update again as soon as we get access to the internet. Miss you all!