Road Trip: WA to MN and back in less than 3 days

As you may have read in a recent post, my parents are here for the week. They have been looking at buying a new camping trailer for a while and thought they would pick it up this summer. Well long story short one was available and seeing as they were already going to be in WA my dad decided to take advantage of this opportunity and head east and pick it up. I decided to take vacation and go to help. The following adventure ensued.

My parents left CA Friday afternoon and drove all night and arrived at our house Saturday morning. Saturday we worked around the house and my mom took a test online. We relaxed a bit and turned in for the night.

Sunday my dad and I loaded up and left around 8:40am while Samantha, the kids and my mom went to church. Here are some pictures of our road trip:

Picture from a rest stop on 395 (they had free coffee, very nice!)


We got gas in Spokane.


I thought this sign was interesting. "Buy the bagfull" (not sure if that is a typo or an intentional play on words). Gotta love a bag of hamburgers!


There was a little snow on the pass near Cour de' Lane:


Once we were on the other side of the pass we did see some rain, but is was pretty smooth driving.


We drove all night and only saw one accident.


Here's my dad still looking fresh. You can tell this is early in the trip.

I thought Bubba would like this picture.


We arrived at the manufacturer's facility around 9:30am Monday morning. Here is my dad checking out his new trailer:


We had to wait about an hour for them to put the hitch on the truck and Wayne gave us a tour of the facility while we waited (the IT grad in me felt right at home).








Back on the road



Everything was going good, until it started to really snow. We had to stop in Beach ND for the night. It was just too scary to drive.



We ate dinner and crashed for the night. Ah 8 hours of sleep. So nice. We got hit with 3 inches of snow while we slept and the roads were even worse when we got up, but they were working on them and they improved the farther west we went.


If you look close you can see a tanker truck that has wrecked.


The rest of the trip was rather uneventful. It was interesting driving from snow to beautiful green back into snow again.





We arived home around midnight Tuesday night. It was so good to drive in the driveway and see our home. It was especially great to sleep in my own bed and see Samantha and the kids this morning. Home... there's no place like it!