The Big Trip, Part 1

The big trip started out at 3:30am, as I rolled out of bed after only 4 1/2 hours of sleep. I carried three little sleeping bodies out and put them into the backs seats of our minivan, silently praising the engineers at Dodge that thought of reclining bench seats. With kids safely secured, we drove away from our house.

Mountain Dew quickly became my new best friend, and was the only thing that kept me awake and alert until one of our tires blew out on the interstate while I was doing about 80mph. After that, there was enough adrenaline in my blood to keep a small third world country running for several days. After spending a few extra, unplanned hours in Cedar City, we again hit the road.

Just outside of Vegas, we announced to the kids that we were going to stop at the Luxor and see the mummy exhibit. McKay, our eight year old, pipes up and relates how her teacher said that mummies were just dead people wrapped up in toilet paper, only that it wasn't real toilet paper. At this point, Olivia, our six-year old chimes in "What about the toilets, are they real?!" Leave it to my kids to completely miss the death culture of an ancient civilization.

After viewing the mummy exhibit, we again hit the road. The next several hours were marked by stopping at Burger King, taking a highway that was supposed to link us up with Interstate 5, but instead, detoured us onto some obscure avenue that again detoured us back to where we originally detoured, getting lost in San Diego at night ("Hey, I lived here when I was six, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out where we are!), and finally arriving at our hotel after asking for directions twice and ending up lost in the naval shipyards (I am not making this up!).

Arriving at our hotel, we were given our room assignment and keys. I pulled the car up, and walked up the stairs to the room, which had the door sitting wide open, with a large duffel bag laying on the bed, and the room's occupant - a rather large black man puffing away on a cigarette outside of the door. Surmising that Mr. Nicotine didn't want a family of five shacking up with him, I returned to the office and was issued another room.

Day 2

Slept in, then drove up Interstate 5 and saw the big white LDS temple just off the side of the freeway. We turned off and took a look. The flower gardens were gorgeous, and there were sister missionaries there to show pictures of the temple's interior to our girls and talk about temples in general. I can't help but think that the temple must have caused a few accidents as people round the corner on the beltway at night and suddenly are looking at this large white shining building that looks like an alien mother ship. After the temple we attended church services, then headed out to Mission Beach to let the girls splash in the ocean. You could immediately classify everyone into one of two categories: There to have a good time and There to be seen. More on that later.

We returned to the hotel and enjoyed a bathtub-warm swimming pool for about an hour, then headed to bed. More tomorrow...