Road Trip Diary Day 3

aka Mother's Day.

I woke up Sunday morning at 9:30 after about 8 hours of sleep, which would have been great if I hadn't already been operating on 5 hours per night for the previous three sleeps. But all in all I was actually feeling pretty darn good. We already had 1081 miles of road under us with only 300 miles to our first two-night stopover...meaning one full day of NO driving. And the less than 300 would be the least number of miles yet traveled. Piece of cake.

So, I was cool with he late wake-up. Took Pumpkin out for a pee, then had a long hot shower while I let Jaimie's sleep hit the 9 and a half hour mark. By the time we got on the road it was 11am but that was no big deal. We had a lunch date set up with Steve B (frequent reader and commenter here) just north of Seattle and figured it wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to get there.

As a matter of fact, I was talking to Steve on the phone making the final arrangement while I was heading up the I-5 when I noticed a dark colored Dodge on the left shoulder with a guy at the rear of the driver's side looking as if he was fixing something with the back tire. That is until he suddenly popped up waving at me with what looked to be a large gun in his hand.

Indeed it was a gun. A radar gun. What the fuck? That's a cheap shot. Disguised as a civilian car and hiding his uniform behind the rear end of his car...just sitting there in plain sight waiting to pounce on poor little me. I couldn't have been on the road more than 10 minutes before he nailed me. Welcome to Washington. You've just been screwed. I pulled over and he came up to the car and asked if I knew how fast I was going. Before I could answer he told me I was doing 83. I responded with, "Aw, come on, you know it's Mother's Day, right?" He took my license and registration and insurance and went back to his car and didn't come back for at least 10 minutes. Two other people who had also pulled over and stopped in front of me finally just drove off. Why didn't he start at the fron of the line and work his way back to me?

When he came back to my car I told him I hoped he had their plate numbers so he could send them their tickets and he said he wasn't pulling them over...just me. Gee, thanks. They were obviously speeding if they pulled over and waited that long for their tickets too. He then told me he cut me a Mom's Day break by lowering my speed to 75 which gave me the lowest possible fine. Gee, thanks. I would have been happier with a warning.

Then came the rest of the tiny state of Washington. After all these fast moving empty roads through California and Oregon we were suddenly ensconced in piles of traffic. There was some accident near the Seattle Convention Center that was causing a back-up that slowed us to 3 mph for about 45 minutes. We never saw the supposed accident. Just your regular Seattle Sunday rush hour it seemed.

We had to keep calling Steve to give him our lame excuses as to why it was taking us 3 hours to make a 2 hour drive. Actually, by the time we got there it was 3:30 something and we were two and a half hours behind our intended schedule. Which meant we also had to call Raymond (my friend who had kindly insisted we stay at his house in Vancouver) - after I had emailed the night before and said we'd definitely make it for dinner - and let him know we were way behind schedule.

Okay, enough words... here's the pictorial... damn, I totally should have shot the cop...

Sunday traffic in Seattle - this bit of freeway reminds me of downtown LA but with more foliage.

I take a lot of tunnel pictures. This one is cool (in my opinion) because of my hand in the top left corner.

Steve and his daughter, Cassidy. Thanks for lunch guys...we had a blast.

This is the Peace Arch at the border crossing. That's Jaimie and Pumpkin frolicking on the grass while I inch forward in the 50 minute line.

We arrived at Raymond's at 8:30pm.

It took us 9.5 hours to drive less than 300 miles.

Not a good showing.

I'm still bagged and wish I could take a day to myself and get some sleep...but that's a whole other post, coming soon to a blog near you.