Christmas Vacation part 1: The DRIVE to SD

Hi all, we hope you had a wonderful holiday season and that your new year has started well. We had a great vacation with family and friends, and are happy to be home safely.

As everyone knows, the Northwest has been getting hammered (as many other parts of the country have been as well) by crazy weather in the past month or so. The last post was on the day we were supposed to leave, but the weather was not good and we actually thought we were not going to be able to leave that day. Our route takes us through the Columbia River Gorge (I-84) and that was closed, as was Snoqulamie Pass up outside of Seattle, so we thought we would wait until the next day. We were disappointed, but we had a fun evening with Mike, Staci, Nick, and Wiatt, and then went home to check out the weather and see what our best option was.

Sooo, it turned out that it didn't look like anything was going to get any better for quite a while, and there was a smidgeon of a let up, so we decided to pack up and go. At midnight. Yes, midnight. A little crazy, ok a lot crazy, but that's what we did, and looking back, even though it was sheer hell, we probably wouldn't have been able to get out at all if we had waited, and we would have missed a lot of our time with our families.

So, we got going and it was only raining in Corvallis, but only about 15 miles up I-5, and we came upon some of the worst road conditions I have ever seen. It had snowed, and then freezing rain was on top of that, and then more snow, and since there are no plows or anything around here, the road just looked like a field that people were trying to navigate through. People were stopped in the middle of the road putting on chains, people just went back and forth between "lanes" trying to find the least amount of piled up ice that was by this point was a total washboard. The bridges which are designed to expand and contract were somehow so off that at one point, we went over a bump about the size of a double curb, and thankfully someone had at least left a flare there, so I slowed down from my speedy 15-20 miles an hour, but couldn't really see what was there, and when we hit it it was a HUGE bump and really loud, and Jeff woke up, and the bumps and the noise were enough that it kept him up for a couple of hours.

When we got to Portland, the roads were actually not as bad as south of there, but there was a chain law in effect, so we chained up and got going again. We were able to go between 15 and 35 miles per hour all the way up I-5. Oh, I forgot to mention: I-84 was still closed, so we had chosen to drive the extra miles up north to get on I-90, since Snoqualmie Pass had opened.

One other fun occurance on that part of the trip was getting a flat tire on one of our brand new studded snow tires at 4:30 in the morning. Thankfully our Acura has a sensor for having a flat, because with the road conditions and all, we probably never would have known. We stopped and filled it up, it seemed like it held at least a little, so we thought maybe it was a nail or something. Then we got a Fix-a-Flat which worked pretty well... anyway, we made it to a Les Schwab at 7:30 in the morning and they fixed us up. There were two large pieces of what looks like part of a chain that probably fell off someone else's tire. When we arrived at the Les Schwab, we had traveled about 260 miles in 7.5 hours. eek. We then had snowpacked roads with an occasional clear left lane which seemed like heaven. We saw a lot of people in the ditch and sooooo much snow everywhere. wow. We finally were exhausted at about 6pm and stopped in Coeur D'Alene, ID and spent the night there. We got a pretty good deal on a hotel room and went swimming and got some pizza. We got going the next morning and had a pretty good day with similar conditions from the day before. We drove to Sheridan, WY, which is only a couple hundred miles from our destination, but it was really late and we needed to stop. Then the next day we had great roads and made it to Spearfish by early afternoon. It was great to finally be there! More interesting parts of the trip to come. Just trying to document everything from the trip. :)