View From the Bushes

In my family, the closer you come to death on a vacation, the better the vacation is. Okay, that's not literally true -- but it's a good guideline. Based on that, the vacation I just got back from was pretty good. The original plan was for me to leave for work early the day after Christmas, pack up the wife and kids and head about three hours north for a skiing/snowmobiling vacation. Of course, when I woke up the power was out, and it just went downhill from there.

The reason that the power was out is that about foot of snow had fallen overnight which necessitated me spending an hour shoveling before I could even think about going to work. After carefully picking my way across town and into work, I realized that we needed to leave town as soon as possible if we didn't want to be driving through high mountain canyons well into the night. Still, it took a couple more hours to finish packing, which I spent at work trying to figure out if there was anyway to get to where I was going without driving over two high mountain canyons. There wasn't.

In any case, we finally got on the road. It's hard to describe how bad the weather was. At one point I was going 15 miles an hour on the freeway and I was passing people doing 10 mph. Then just when I thought the worst was over, some kindly motorist pulled up alongside me and pointed out that I had a flat tire. So I pulled off and sure enough I had a nail in one of my tires, I figured that was it was going to take three hours to get the tire fixed and I was going to have to limp back to my cold, dark house and admit defeat. Fortunately I found a tire place, got right in and was back on the road in about a half an hour.

The rest of the drive was scary but mostly uneventful, though my neck just about wouldn't move when I finally arrived; I had accumulated so much stress. The actual vacation was pretty good, though the weather was basically crap the entire time. I did get in one good day of skiing, though being old and fat my legs still haven't recovered. This was compounded by running through the powder behind my kids while they rode the little snowmobile.

In any case, it finally came time for me to try and traverse the snow-packed mountain passes and drive back home. Initially we were going to do it last night, but visibility was poor and it was snowing, so we decided to wait until this morning, of course by then my older son was sick and started throwing up (this is the same child of projectile vomit fame). In the end, he threw up six times in the time it took us to drive home. Driving home today meant taking another day off, but of course I still ended up getting called in anyway. In any case, that's mostly what's happened since I last posted. I may or may not post tomorrow, but whether it's tomorrow or Friday, I promise to whine less.

Happy New Year!
Ross