The Merediths: Trip to California

Kelly called me one day in the middle of December while he was on the road and asked if I wanted to go to California with him and we were to leave in 2 days. Normally I would have said no but I had had a rough week with the dog and he had been gone for over a week and I knew that a trip away for a few days might be just what I needed....so I made arrangements for the kids and off we went!

The trip didn't go exactly as planned. We left early in the morning with our new (broken) couch loaded in the back of the truck. Kelly had brought it home and after we had taken it downstairs we realized that it was broken so we were going to take it back to the warehouse so they could fix it before we got on our flight to California. We gave ourselves over 4 hours which was more than enough time but we didn't realize what kind of weather was in store for us.

A few miles out of town the snow began to cover the road. We weren't too worried but as we kept going, the snow kept coming and roads kept getting worse.

Long before we got near Salt Lake it was obvious that we weren't going to make our flight. And remember that couch in the back of our truck? We didn't even have plastic over it so the snow soaked it and as we drove past semi after semi more dirty, snowy water splashed on it. (Amazingly, they were still able to clean it up and we picked it up a week later.)

This is about the point that we knew FOR SURE we were going to miss our flight. 8 miles from the airport but going 5 miles/hour.

We dropped off the couch and finally arrived at the airport an hour after our flight was supposed to leave. Come to find out, we didn't miss our flight after all because it was canceled. The whole airport had closed for a few hours. We sat around for several more hours until we were finally able to get on a flight. We passed the time by watching the HUGE snowplows and talking to a guy from CA that we met.

We missed the dinner in California with Kelly's technicians (the whole reason for the trip) because we were so late. We checked into our hotel and went to bed...only to be awoken at 1:30 to a fire alarm. We ignored it for a good ten minutes before we decided we'd better go down since the alarm was still going off. Come to find out there really WAS a fire in the hotel, down in the laundry room in a different wing than where we were staying. Sprinklers in some of the hotel rooms even came on! Finally after about an hour of hanging out in the hallway downstairs we went back up to our room.

Kelly left the next morning to go visit the site and I got to sleep in. :) I ate a cookie for breakfast and read my book for awhile. The trip was finally looking better!