Happy New Year!

We are back and happy to be home!  I'm so embarrassed to say that we don't have any good photos of our trip!  Seriously!  I don't know what happened.  Well, we were just wrapped up in what we were doing I guess.  Embarrassing.

But I do have a couple photos of our miserable drive down to Eagle Point. 

Now... I live near Seattle.... I've been in some baaaaad traffic.  Traveling to Montana as often as we do, we've been on some baaaad roads...
But never in all our lives (Jason too) have we ever been in or seen anything as bad as out trip down through Portland the Tuesday before Christmas.

The roads were fine until we got just south of downtown Portland.  Then all of a sudden it was a super thick sheet of ice.  At first it wasn't too bad... Everyone was going so slow and there was so much traffic that it wasn't really dangerous.

So after almost 4 hours... Yes 4 hours... We were finally coming up on a little hill (the one by the exit to Canby, so we probably went maybe 15 miles in 4 hours) and realized that this was where all the big problems were.   I was driving and I was in the left lane and it was dark now and all of a sudden there was a semi in front of me stopped on the hill, so I got over finally and finagled myself around him then there were two more semis stopped right next to each other putting on chains in the middle of the freeeway.  The road was solid ice, so getting around then on a hill even with all wheel drive was difficult.  I can't imagine if you had a regular car.  It was craziness. 

The roads were ice all the way past Salem and we probably only went about 30 miles per hour all that way.  With some little slips and slides along the way...  We made it to Albany, because I wanted to get past all that for the rest of our drive in the morning.  I was never so glad to see the rain in Albany.

So that was how our nice vacation started out.  Luckly we had a dvd for the boys or it would have been the ulitmate nightmare.  They were soooo sick of the car by the time we got to Albany.

The rest of our vacation was fairly uneventful, thankfully.  We had a great Christmas and enjoyed spending it with some of our family we don't get to see very much.  Had some hot poker games and even broke out some of the old games like Scattergories and Cranium.  Jason and I of course dominated the game scene as we always do. 

Our family is just a hair on the competitive side.  (That is a mild understatement) As we were yelling at each other during Scattergories (yelling in a loving way) I told everyone it was a good thing that Jason could fit in and yell for himself.  In the Addington family (my maiden name) when it comes to games, it's eat or be eaten.  Monica (my brothers wife) was scared of the Scattergories game, but she hangs in for most of the games.  She even won a big game of poker.  It always in good fun, and since I was rasied that way I love it. :)

Anyway, it was a good little trip and the drive home was easy in comparison to the drive down.  The boys had fun with their cousins and got their prized Nintendo DS game that they have been wanting for over a
year.

Hope your Christmas and New Years was great!!