Feet First

I don't know who all is following the weather conditions in the Northwest this week, but I am.

There was a taping for a special tv broadcast thing for this Christmas compilation CD that benefits children's hospitals that I'm involved with this year in Seattle, so I drove up Thursday to be there for that (and by "I drove", I mean "I was in the car while somebody else drove"). Mom came up Saturday for the actual taping, I met Sanjaya, hung out with my Steves, and stayed in this strange hotel- Not strange scary, strange... artsy? very Seattle, I guess. Tiny elevators. Definitely not Marriott.

Me and Mom headed up to my aunt's house north of Seattle to hang out and shop for a couple days after that. And get our hair done. We were all over the greater Seattle area on Monday, and I have never seen it rain like that. Neither had the locals, apparently, but it was seriously bucketing all day (in the end it got 2nd place for record rainfall in a day for the area ). We were involved in a minor vehicular cosmetic issue on the freeway, but that's off the record and no big deal. We watched the news that night back at my aunt's, and learned that a 20 mile stretch of I-5 was CLOSED (at Chehalis, for those of you who know where that is). Shut down. Completely flooded. Kind of an important freeway to have open. For me. This week. So there was no hope Tuesday of getting home, which was fine with me. Off the record.

It's not like an accident, or even a tree falling on the road- you can't really clear water off, and it means that all the other alternate routes around it were out as well. Then the next closest alt. routes were shut down by idiot drivers who thought that their car was magic. We got varying reports of when I-5 would be open again, none of them promising. The flood waters finally started to recede today, half an inch an hour, but even so the reporters were heard to say things like "unsure of the structural integrity" and "concrete strewn about the freeway like Legos in a child's bedroom".

With our options limited, Mom and I headed out this morning with an atlas and took the very, very long way home. Seattle to Salem, via Yakima. That adds about 250 miles to the journey, for those keeping track at home. But it was a pretty drive, I saw new places, we had good weather (until we reached Portland), we're safe, and I was kind of in the mood for an adventure.

Not that I would wish it, but the whole thing was kind of exciting. Home is kind of anti-climactic.