Friday, December 28, 2012

We bought a car! And the story of our awful drive home.

Warning! This post is long. Read at your own risk.
So Washington was great! We had lots of fun with my family, had a cool baby shower for Kaylee and held an adorable little baby, and we also bought a car!!! Pretty exciting, huh? We bought one way flights to get there and we're just planning on renting a car to drive back (because I got Cody a punching bag for Christmas, and that probably wouldn't fit too well in our luggage) but we decided to look at a few dealerships to see what we found. We almost bought a grandma looking car because it was a really good deal, but thank goodness we didn't! It's actually a long and boring story so I'm not going to tell it. But it's a Ford Fusion 2007, manual transmission (and no, I didn't know how to drive a manual when we decided to buy it). And we love it! It's definitely the fanciest car either of us have ever had! Cody taught me how to drive that night (Monday) and I actually caught on pretty quickly! We love love love it!


As far as the driving on this trip... not so great. We left my Mom's house around 7:30am, but we stopped at Fred Meyer for a few essentials on the road and we were off.

Holy fog!
We turned on the GPS on Cody's phone and started heading up to Snoqualmie Pass.. so we thought. But apparently the GPS had another plan in mind. We ended up driving all the way to Crystal Mountain and ending up in a ski resort parking lot (Because the pass that it wanted us to go through closes every winter...) WHAT THE HECK, GPS?! So we tried finding our way out, which was easier said than done. We got stuck about 4 or 5 times, being able to get out of them 3 times just by reversing, but the last two we needed people to push us. We finally get help from one parking lot worker who tells us how to get back to where we needed to be (thank goodness for him! We got back on track by his directions alone! Thanks for your act of kindness, sir!) and it turns out that by taking this route of going up the mountain, we were about an hour out of our way. So with the getting stuck and everything, we were about 2 and a half hours off track. We finally get back on our way and decide to download a better GPS because the other one clearly sucked. But because we were up in the mountains, we had close to no service, so the new GPS took about 2 hours to download.

While waiting for the new GPS to load, the old one managed to get us lost AGAIN! It told us to take this random, out in the middle of no where exit and was seriously taking us to no-mans land. So after about half an hour of that, we were back on the freeway, and our new GPS was CLOSE to downloading.. But it completely drained Cody's phone battery and we didn't have a car charger with us. So we had to look for a well known store that would have a car phone charger. Making that stop took longer than we thought because we had to take Dexter out to go to the bathroom, go back into another store to get towels to dry Dex off, and then we finally left.
He was so cuddly after I dried him off! He slept like this for about an hour (:
 So now we're on the road, with a working GPS, charged phone, and it starts getting dark. Which is fine, but we were in Oregon on that long stretch of curvey road in the mountains, and it started getting icy. And I mean REALLY icy. We were sliding all over the place, so we had to go 35-40mph on the FREEWAY! It was about 8pm at this point, and Cody had been driving all day because he didn't want me to drive in that kind of weather. So he's stressing his brains out trying to keep us on the road without dying, and he later told me it was thee most scary and stressful driving experience he's EVER had in his life. Finally after a little while of this, we decided to stay the night at a hotel instead of trying to get back to Orem that night. (Cody was supposed to go to work the next day at 9am, but we decided staying alive and sane was a much better idea than getting him to work on time). But the nearest hotel was 100 miles away, so Cody was stuck driving in this weather for another 100 miles. I felt awful, knowing there wasn't anything I could do to help. Oh, and the chains we had for our tires were too small.

We finally got to the Best Western, checked in, and brought all of our luggage inside.
Yes, we had Dexter. No we didn't tell them. But don't worry, he's hypo-allergenic and didn't make any kind of mess. You couldn't even tell he was there when we left. Anyways, we were still stressed knowing we'd have to wake up and drive on those kinds of roads again in the morning (most likely). But we prayed and prayed and prayed even more that we would have decent weather conditions to drive in the next day, and let me tell you, God loves us. All of the roads were completely dry and it was even sunny for most of the day!! Complete opposite of what it was the night before.

He's so silly.. sits in the weirdest positions/places!
The center console (which we didn't have in our other car) is Dexter's official seat, apparently. He was either sitting here, or sleeping on my lap for the entire drive!
He was falling asleep sitting up on the center console, kept leaning a ton and bobbing his head, and ended up with his butt still on the center console and his head on my leg. What a cutie!
Until we got to a part of the freeway in Idaho where they decided to completely block off the entire freeway. We ended up taking about an hour and a half detour (when we could have driven that stretch of the freeway in 15 minutes) and those roads were in the middle of no where, 100 miles long (at least that's how it felt, because we were going 2 FREAKING MILES PER HOUR!) and they were icy. So bring on the anxiety attack again, thinking we're going to die. After FINALLY getting back on the freeway, it was clear roads all the way to Cody's parent's house, which is where we went to open more presents and get our old car. I can't even tell you how nice it felt to be off the roads and in a familiar place!!
I was eating twizzlers, and I was curious to see if they could be crocheted! They can!
 After staying there for a while, we headed down to Holly and Jordan's for cake and ice cream for Holly's birthday! (Happy birthday again, Holly!) We finally headed home at 11, unpacked our cars, and were finally home! Dexter was so excited to be home, he was running around the entire house, practically skipping with joy. And what kind of a welcome home to Utah would it be without at least a foot and a half of snow?!? I had fun shoveling the driveway, a walk way to the back door, a walk way to our front gate, and a race track in the front yard for Dexter to run around in go to the bathroom without getting caked in snow.

Before I shoveled
And after
I've been taking down Christmas decorations all day today as well as unpacking, and tomorrow I'll take the car to a car wash and get it registered! Hope you are having a good weekend after Christmas!

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