The Drive From HELL!

For Thanksgiving Ryan, Addy, and I traveled to Napa to celebrate with Ryan's family. We figured with stops to eat and traffic it would be a 9 hour drive. It's a pretty long trip no matter what, but especially with a newborn baby in the car, but we figured it would be manageable. The sad part is we weren't able to get on the road until about 1:00 on Wednesday, because Ryan had to teach his lab at school. We got on the road, excited to be able to go visit Ryan's family. As everyone well knows, when you travel the day before Thanksgiving you can expect a lot of other cars on the road. I have to tell you though, driving through the LA area and onwards I have never seen such nasty, heinous traffic in all my life! We were at a crawling speed and it seemed it would never end! It usually takes about 2 hours to get from where we live to LA, it ended up taking us 7 hours to get from our house to north LA!!! Yes, I said 7 hours! What was supposed to be a 9 hour trip ended up taking us 15 hours. Yes, I said 15 hours! Ryan and I were both so cranky, hungry, tired, and bitter after we got out of it! The icing on the cake is, when we were about 1 hour from Napa we had to cross a toll bridge. Ryan had thought beforehand and had scrounged up about $2.00 in change, since neither of us had any cash on us. (60 cents of which was in pennies, which I'm sure would have been greatly appreciated!) When we got to the bridge it ended up being $4.00 and since we didn't have the cash to pay, we were told we would receive a $29.00 ticket in the mail. We ended up arriving in Napa at 4:30 a.m. Yes, I said 4:30 a.m., exhausted beyond belief. One great upside to this trip was our sweet baby was such a trooper. She definitely complained less than either of the adults in the car. She slept, sucked on her pacifier, and hardly even fussed the whole time, despite being strapped into her car seat. We were all happy to arrive in Napa alive and well! Cross your fingers for us that tommorow's trip home will be better than the trip to get to Napa.