Our exciting trip to Bend...

Last weekend, Matthew woke up, and when he came into the living room, I asked him what he wanted to do that day. His response was, "Go to Bend." We have never been to Bend, but this is where we are going to get a rental home in a couple of months, and all this "Bend talk" had his mind curious, so I looked at Mike, and he said, "Sure. Let's do it."

In about 2 hours time, I had secured us a hotel room, and had our family of four packed and ready to go. We had to go buy chains for the van, and make sure we had all that was needed to get us there, and back.

My sister jumped at the chace to go, and once we were there, we had such a great time. Our hotel was going through a remodel, but as soon as we checked in, they cleaned up for the night, and all was quiet in the world, and we were relaxing. We left, and checked out the whole town so we would know where to find this, and that, and not have to miss out on our precious vacation time that will be coming up. We aren't actually staying in Bend in May, but in a resort town about 15 miles away. It was a ton of fun. We went and had a very noisy, but very awesome dinner at Red Robin. It was packed full of kids, and it was just a breath of fresh air to go to since I didn't have to worry about our wild bunch being too noisy, or out of hand.

The next day we found our rental home, and scoped out the entire resort where we will stay, and again, went through the grocery stores to scan prices of food. We wanted to see if it would be cheaper if we shopped ahead of time, or waited till we got there..then we hit the outlet mall, and drove home.

The ride home was great until we got back over the pass. Once we got through all of the snow, some insane wind and rain picked up. I told Mike I would drive since he seemed sleepy, and I was driving for about an hour when the van started to shift from all of the wind gusts. I was scared, but didn't want to say anything, and then the large trees in the mountains started to sway back and forth..we decided that we needed to pull over for safety. We found a little country store, and their power was out, but they let us use the restrooms, and we were on our way again...but not for long.

Once we hit the road again, it was evident that a very bad storm was coming our way, and there was HUGE branches in the road (highway) and then we came to a standstill. We got through one stand still to another until we realized we weren't going to move anymore, and we didn't move for 8 hours. EIGHT.LONG.HOURS. Seems there was power lines down in the road ahead, and there was pine trees that had fallen with split trunks from the wind and lightening. There was trees resting on powerlines causing them to droop above head, so the state police weren't letting anything through until the power company would fix the main issues. I won't go into detail what happened during those 8 hours, but we made it through, and all survived. There was a lot of tears, and fear we were never going to make it home, and without cell service, we were pretty scared.

Lucky for us we pack like fools. We bring all but the kitchen sink so we were warm, we were fed, we were hydrated, we stayed safe. But...we will probably never take a trip on a whim again. I used to think going like that was the BEST part of a trip. Not so sure now. I haven't quite got used to staying still at a traffic light since we have been back, it gets stressful wondering if you are going to get stuck again.

We asked Matt today as we were on a drive if we should drive to Bend tonight, and he says, "No way, Jose!" Hopefully by May, he is ready for a long car ride again. ;) :)