The Long Haul

We just got back from a short trip to Utah… Ok, so the stay was short – the trip was loooong.  At any rate the whole of the trip would make a horribly loooong post so I’ve decided to split it up a bit.  And those bits will come at you randomly in the up-coming days/ weeks/ months.
Grant’s high school buddy Scotikus got married and the Strattons moved to their new house in Nibley, Utah… Where is that, you may be asking yourself… and here’s your answer: No where.  Do you see that pushpin? Yeah… That’s them.  You may be saying it’s just a suburb of Logan about now, but you’d be wrong.  Maybe after the next two housing booms it’ll be a suburb, but until then it’s pretty rural.

Anyway, the trip (according to Google) is about 15 1/2 hours from our place, and that’s if you take the shortest route between two points. If you want to stay all interstate, its more like 17 1/2.
We thought that we would probably do anything to shorten a long car trip with the girls, so we woke up at 2:30am, packed the car and the girls, and were off by 3. (Yuck!)  That meant that as soon as the girls were over their initial jittery excitement they slept… a lot!
But don’t worry I’m not going to bore you with every detail of the trip there or back.  I’ll just give you the hi-lights of our conversations.

Apple Juice Explosion:

Oh, around 4am on the way up Cairn decided she wanted breakfast… specifically her apple juice.  I help open it and I hear her sipping it happily afterwards. What I didn’t hear was her putting it in her lunch bag with no lid and the lunch bag spilling…  A few hours later I reach back to get something and my hand was wet!
Well, I start frantically soaking up the juice with the baby carrier that I threw in the car as a last minute, just in case item.  I find the juice has covered the whole of the seat between the girls.  By the time I’m finished with that little no man’s land my lap and seat are sticky and wet… And I think I’m done when I reach behind me for a jacket.  Knowing that we’re going into cold, snowing weather this is what angered me (yes, I was laughing until this point).  And this is when I couldn’t refrain from scolding Cairn:
Me: You should have put the lid on your juice!  Now you spilled on the jackets!!!
Cairn: You shouldn’t put jackets where I spill on them.
Grant and I burst into laughter and Cairn bawled because we were laughing at her…

Shooting Stars:

Through out the whole trip (even in broad daylight) Cairn would randomly look out her window and declare she saw a shooting star.  I would (even in broad daylight) prompt her to make a wish then ask what she wished for (I don’t believe the bit about not telling wishes… that’s only for when you already don’t want it to come true!).  Well her first wish was the most memorable:
Cairn: I wish the giraffes stay out of the road.
And fabulously, at the end of our long haul, we saw a jeep painted like a giraffe… parked safely off the road!

City Names:

We couldn’t help but make fun of some of the city names we passed by.  Here are the two longest lasting chuckles in our cabin fever haze:
Farr West: It was settled by pirates! ‘fARRR West’ be where we heading!
Ogden: (Imagine a large, brutish, rather dense monster) ‘What you do here? This Og den! You no Og! Me Og!  Get out Og den!’