Family Vacation

I learned that even though you may live in the same house with your family, you still don't know them well enough until you've spent several hours with them in a small confined space like a moving vehicle. See if you live in a house together you can still get away from them whenever they annoy you, but in a moving vehicle there is no other place to go. That was the first lesson I re-learned during our family vacation.

We left California early Friday morning to ensure that we arrived in Portland, OR with plenty of time to visit friends. Since I work graveyard that meant I spent most of that drive laying in the back seat of the van sleeping while my father drove. My brother is more of a swing-shift guy and so he still sleeps in the morning. The drive was nice and scenic though you knew you weren't in California anymore as soon as you saw the lush green hills of Oregon. My parents had an old friend who was ill in Vancouver, WA which is just across the river from Portland so we visited her first. Her kids knew me and my brother and saw us growing up so the families are pretty close in that sense. We spent Friday night at another of my parent's friends house. Now I had forgotten how wet, gray and dreary the North-West was and so on this trip I brought some shorts and only one pair of jeans. What a mistake! I soon learned that even though it is summer the sun only peaks through in the great North-West and doesn't stay very long. It was wet and drizzly in Oregon when we left Saturday morning to head to Washington.

That was lesson number two: always bring more than one pair of pants on a trip.