Christmas Trip (or everything that can go wrong does)

We finally made it down to Phoenix and we are so glad to be here. Because, frankly, we had our doubts. Yesterday, we woke up at various times during the 5 am hour and got the last bits and details pulled together, walked out the door, locked it up, and turned to the car. We saw a river of oil gushing forth.

Dang it.

Soooooo, Zach ran down to the closest gas station and got more oil and another filter (our filter blew out) and replaced them both (he did all of this in less than an hour, by the way. Ya, he's totally awesome.) Then we got on the road. Just a minor set back. No worries.

We're heading down the highway and we hit a detour. Dang it. It took us all the way to the coast and it took us over an hour to get there. Before the detour we were 190 miles from Los Angeles. After the detour we were 210. How does that work?

Then we hit the L.A. traffic. We spent over 200 miles going bumper to bumper. It wasn't clear until we got to the east side of L.A. Sam gave up about half way through. He said wanted to go home. He was done.

So, in the end a 12 to 13 hour trip took 17 and a half hours. We finally ended up getting there at 2:30 am. Totally exhausted. Or rather, Zach and I were, but Ben and Sam had been sleeping the last several hours of driving so they were ready to play. Sigh.

The bright moments: we got to see the beautiful Pacific oceans, including seeing dolphins swimming off the coast, the boys behaved wonderfully, and now we're here. And that's nice.