Winter Wonderland (Day 2)

Our journey home for the Christmas holidays had already been quite the adventure and sadly our second day on the road wasn't much better than the first.  We left Klamath Falls, Oregon and headed up north through central Oregon.  What usually would take a couple hours to Bend, took us over 7 hours due to horrible weather, road conditions, accidents, traffic, and trouble with our chains.  At least the scenery was gorgeous along the way...what we could see of it!

The trouble with central Oregon is there is only one main highway that runs straight up to eastern Washington and it's a two lane highway.  Often times it's heavily populated with semi trucks and you can get held up in traffic.  This time we couldn't even see the sides of the road.  Dallas had to carefully watch for the posts along the side of the highway in order to know whether he was going to drive off the side or not.  You can see in the below pictures how difficult is was to drive in these conditions, especially with semis coming straight at us.

Dallas did an amazing job at driving cautiously and keeping us safe.  He was a saint and drove through the most difficult parts of the drive.

This was also the day that we realized our chains did not fit our tires.  It took a long time to attach them again, but this day we had to pull over several times because the chains kept breaking.  Three different sections broke along our drive and were not reparable so we had to get wire cutters to cut off the separated pieces.  By the time we got to Bend, Oregon (7 hours later) we threw away our old chains and bought another pair that actually fit our tires.

Daxton was, once again, absolutely amazing.  I sat in the back with him, so I could feed him without having to stop each time.  He was totally content playing with mommy, eating, and sleeping.  He never once cried.  He was an absolute angel, which was a total blessing considering what a crazy adventure we were having.

We pulled over once the roads cleared to take off our chains.  You can see all the different sections that broke along our journey.  You can also see the not-so-happy daddy face.  Dallas' patience was definitely tested over the course of our two day road trip home!

We didn't reach home til close to midnight that night.
We had been driving for over 14 hours...not to mention the over 12 hours the day before.  We can honestly say that we will NOT be driving to Washington anytime soon!
(On a side note...our drive home was MUCH better.  It only took 12 hours total, although we did decide to break it up into two days again to make it a bit easier on our little guy.)