Sixty-Six Days of Summer 2015: Day 1

According to one of the two adults that live in our house, we left much later than we were "supposed to" this morning..... and, it wasn't me. In fact, I actually thought (silently to myself of course) if we get out of the house by 12:00pm it will be a miracle; we left at 11:48 -Aha! Miracle! Let me just inform you all that getting ready for a trip on the road is a lot of work. We have been staying up late for the past week and getting up early to juggle the kids, work and the readying ourselves for this journey. Sleep has been sparse. I think even though we are all a little on the tired side, excitement took us over this morning.

So Day 1 has begun - Yay! But before I get to anything else, let's back things up for a moment so that I can share a little story - a funny story in which the best part is (for me anyway) the fact that the incident partially contributed to us leaving later than someone thought we should have. I am certain that this will not be the only story like this that I tell this summer!

"Robin, which one of the valves do I open to fill the water tank, the top one?",is what was yelled up to me as I was blow drying my hair. "Ummm, give me a minute and I'll be down", was my reply. Now, so you understand..... the minute I needed was the minute to look up the answer on YouTube. You see, we had watched all of this on a suggested YouTube video last night before we went to bed and quite frankly, not all of the information was ingrained so I wasn't absolutely positive of the answer. I took the minute to look this up and went downstairs and outside where, I found Shale and Eli with a hose inserted into the "flush out". This didn't look right based on my "research" so I pulled this so-called research up on my phone again to find that NO...this is NOT right! As I hurried Eli to go turn the water off immediately, I ran into the trailer in hopes to not find toilet water all over the floor! You see, they had been filling up the BLACK tank (the sewage tank) for ohhhh let's say, ten minutes and the gauge inside confirmed that right away, it was FULL. Excellent (say this with sarcasm). No, luckily there was not water all over the place however, a little panic set in with Shale at this point - We would be driving along, trailer bouncing around behind us for who knows how many miles and hours today and water would be sloshing around and out of the toilet...."We need to find a place to dump". "Since it's just water, do you think I should just open up the line and let it run down the street?" says my poor distraught husband. The man had obviously lost his mind for a minute - Let me be clear here....NO, we did NOT dump in the street Bob (you know who you are) - ok?! Once we were on our way up to Santa Monica, we made a stop in Garden Grove where we could empty the 40+ gallons of water. I have to hand it to David, the very helpful guy at the dumping station; he didn't laugh out loud once while we were there - I am sure that happened the minute we left. The silver lining to this is that we got to practice dumping - awesome (also said with sarcasm).

Santa Monica here we come! Finally, at this point we were REALLY on the road. We parked south of the pier by probably a mile, maybe a little more. We rented a couple of tandem bicycles right by the parking lot to ride to the pier. Cassidy and Eli rode together - neither of which had ever been on a tandem bike so it was pretty entertaining to watch them work together to get balanced and rolling. Shale and I rode behind them to make sure they didn't end up in a pile on top of each other somewhere along the way which could have very easily happened based on how crowded the boardwalk was today! Success, we all made it without any problems. We lunched at Bubba Gump's, took a bunch of photos and rode the roller coaster. We truly live in a beautiful place. Maybe we spent a little longer than "planned" in Santa Monica but it was well worth it - simply splendid!

Getting around in a city like Santa Monica on a Saturday afternoon in the summer is difficult period. Adding a 27' trailer behind you makes the task ten times more stressful and I have to hand it to Shale for keeping his cool. So many people, so many cars, so much traffic and we were moving at a snail's pace. At this point it was clear that we were not going to make it all the way to Needles today. Luckily, San Bernardino had something fun and wacky to offer. Instead of camping in our trailer tonight, we are at the Wigwam Motel! This funky retro motel was built in 1949. There are (19) 30-foot tall tepees placed in a "village style" arrangement. This motel concept was integrated into Disney's Pixar "Cars" movie as the Cozy Cone Motel! We were lucky enough to secure the last vacant tepee for the evening in a pinch. The kids think it is pretty rad and I am going to agree.

Today was a great day. Unplanned, unfortunate (and sometimes, very funny) "things" happen for a reason. Today, I am thankful for our morning snafu. Had we not left later than we were "supposed to", I wouldn't be laying in a wagon wheel bed in Wigwam #18 telling you all about it! Until tomorrow......