Make Believe

Elliott's pitiful nightly cries that he misses Grandpa finally wore me down. 

"What are you doing this week?" I subsequently asked Grandma and Auntie Allison that night as we were video chatting. "We'll pack up tonight and drive down tomorrow." I told them.

That's me: chronic non-planner.  I'm sure that will need to change once my youngin's reach school age, but I try not to dwell on that too much.

Starting with the wintry seven hour drive* down to Orange County, my week so far feels like something fictional and make believe.  After a rainy drive through Oakland and outer urban areas, we made it to the long five hour stretch on the 5 freeway.  I was feeling a bit nervous as there were threats of snow in the grapevine (a mountainous region you must drive through to reach Los Angeles and beyond).  Luckily, it was pretty smooth sailing along rolling miles of road and farmlands.  Row upon row of perfectly measured and orderly orchards flitted by. After a few hours, the sun started to rise and cast its young beams of light upon the waking countryside as we drove.  It started sprinkling and spitting water upon the windshield and the sun played with magic as it bathed the world in a citrusy amber mist cutting right through the rain.  It was truly magical.

The sun rose higher, but suddenly went gray as a hovering cloud encompassed us in a thick layer of fog pushing us gently toward the fairy land ahead where we emerged upon rolling hills covered in a soft carpet of wheat, rain-nourished green, and purply-mauve colored growth.  And then the climb, up, up, up into the mountainous grapevine region where the tipy-tops of the mountains displayed their sparkling white blanket that had been causing such a hub-bub for the CHP and auto travelers.

And then, as if to counteract the surreal fairy-like feeling of our journey, our stay has been ushered in by relentless rain and the sudden overshadowing of a gigantic, incredible, unbelievable, catastrophic, and unfathomable occurrence which is undoubtibly the result of some cataclysmic mistake of identity.

All of it is so very fiction-like.

I realize that I am being incredibly cryptic, but details have been left out to protect the innocent...

*For some amazingly great tips on road trip packing strategy for kids, check out Snip and Snail's blog post here...

The iPhone most certaintly butchers the scenes, but it gives you a general idea, nonetheless...  Sadly, the amber mist you will have to imagine as it refused to be captured.