Well...I'm staying at a motel overnight, in the hopes of better traveling conditions on Christmas Eve for getting over the pass (all the Cascades are terrible, at, like, every single pass right now), soyeah, that's why I can blog right now.
This will probably be my last entry before a week of silence. Heck, I thought my last entry would be, since I didn't get a chance to make an entry earlier today saying we were going.
The trip has been...well, interesting, to say the least. We left an hour and a half later than scheduled (so, about half an hour ahead of expectations!), got to my brother's place, picked him up, and started driving.
We learned that we chose one of the worst possible routes, though, because there was an accident that brought the freeway down to one lane...causing a two and a half hour delay. It literally took us two and a half hours to go TEN miles. You can walk faster than that.
Then, we hit extreme traffic in Portland. We've had some interesting exchanges (we're driving two cars: my parents in our astrovan, us in my younger sister's Subaru legacy, with my older sister's old cat, and my younger sister's toy fox terrier dog), found a few good radio stations (mostly, rock), but the trip has been a little bit painful even to get this far.
That said, when having McDonald's, the iced mocha REALLY hit the spot. I was cold at the time, so it just made me colder, but totally worth it. Store-bought iced coffee is just...BETTER than any warm equivalent. Add in my (plain, because I don't like tomatoes or mustard) Double Quarter Pounder with cheese along with fries made for a good substitute.
There was a slight mix-up on our order (we only got half the number of fries we should have gotten), which caused me to not eat my fries until after my drink was empty, so that was something my taste buds regretted (the food is literally engineered to have the fries eaten BEFORE the drink), but I lived.
We've got cramped traveling conditions, especially given my stubborn insistence of taking ALL my stuff on-hand with me, but I eventually relented when I realized my drawings that I was taking inside my pillowcase weren't getting the protection they normally receive on trips: they were vulnerable, getting crinkled, and such, so I realized I needed to protect them.
Removed my laptop thing (the stand I place it on), put my art inside of it, wrapped it in my spare blanket that I won at my square dance gift exchange, and put it in the trunk.
That's a minor inconvenience NOW, given that it's still there, and no access = no use, but oh well. I'll make do with what I have.
Anyway, I was interrupted in the middle of writing this blog post for an offer to eat at a Chinese restaurant within walking distance of our motel. It was pretty fancy, and the employees all seemed to be Asian, though I don't think they were actually all Chinese. (I think at lease one was Korean. Though, I'm obviously no expert at discerning the differences between their ethnicities.)
Tried some Chinese tea; it wasn't bad. It wasn't particularly good, mind you, not really being more than just water, but it wasn't BAD, and given that I'm generally not a tea person, that's a fair compliment.
I got chicken noodle soup, and to my surprise, I found that they basically leave the ingredients uncut: big lops of chicken, endless noodles, huge pieces of broccoli, peas, mushrooms, and half a dozen other veggies. It was quite delicious, but it was huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge; I was not expecting that much food, so I couldn't eat it all. Got take-out, though: they put it in a cup.
Seems like a little bit of an unorthodox method of transporting chicken noodle soup, but surprisingly practical.
Soyeah, that's my day.
This will probably be my last entry before a week of silence. Heck, I thought my last entry would be, since I didn't get a chance to make an entry earlier today saying we were going.
The trip has been...well, interesting, to say the least. We left an hour and a half later than scheduled (so, about half an hour ahead of expectations!), got to my brother's place, picked him up, and started driving.
We learned that we chose one of the worst possible routes, though, because there was an accident that brought the freeway down to one lane...causing a two and a half hour delay. It literally took us two and a half hours to go TEN miles. You can walk faster than that.
Then, we hit extreme traffic in Portland. We've had some interesting exchanges (we're driving two cars: my parents in our astrovan, us in my younger sister's Subaru legacy, with my older sister's old cat, and my younger sister's toy fox terrier dog), found a few good radio stations (mostly, rock), but the trip has been a little bit painful even to get this far.
That said, when having McDonald's, the iced mocha REALLY hit the spot. I was cold at the time, so it just made me colder, but totally worth it. Store-bought iced coffee is just...BETTER than any warm equivalent. Add in my (plain, because I don't like tomatoes or mustard) Double Quarter Pounder with cheese along with fries made for a good substitute.
There was a slight mix-up on our order (we only got half the number of fries we should have gotten), which caused me to not eat my fries until after my drink was empty, so that was something my taste buds regretted (the food is literally engineered to have the fries eaten BEFORE the drink), but I lived.
We've got cramped traveling conditions, especially given my stubborn insistence of taking ALL my stuff on-hand with me, but I eventually relented when I realized my drawings that I was taking inside my pillowcase weren't getting the protection they normally receive on trips: they were vulnerable, getting crinkled, and such, so I realized I needed to protect them.
Removed my laptop thing (the stand I place it on), put my art inside of it, wrapped it in my spare blanket that I won at my square dance gift exchange, and put it in the trunk.
That's a minor inconvenience NOW, given that it's still there, and no access = no use, but oh well. I'll make do with what I have.
Anyway, I was interrupted in the middle of writing this blog post for an offer to eat at a Chinese restaurant within walking distance of our motel. It was pretty fancy, and the employees all seemed to be Asian, though I don't think they were actually all Chinese. (I think at lease one was Korean. Though, I'm obviously no expert at discerning the differences between their ethnicities.)
Tried some Chinese tea; it wasn't bad. It wasn't particularly good, mind you, not really being more than just water, but it wasn't BAD, and given that I'm generally not a tea person, that's a fair compliment.
I got chicken noodle soup, and to my surprise, I found that they basically leave the ingredients uncut: big lops of chicken, endless noodles, huge pieces of broccoli, peas, mushrooms, and half a dozen other veggies. It was quite delicious, but it was huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge; I was not expecting that much food, so I couldn't eat it all. Got take-out, though: they put it in a cup.
Seems like a little bit of an unorthodox method of transporting chicken noodle soup, but surprisingly practical.
Soyeah, that's my day.
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