i never meant to let this much time pass in between posts because i knew it would be hell to catch up, especially since i took a two-week trip up the west coast and over to Minneapolis. it was about 3000 miles. carl and i drove the little Honda that could. Thirteen years old and it keeps going and going. It's funny, this car, because in 2001 the speedometer quit working on it. Along with that the odometer was no longer reliable either. it kept working but sometimes it wouldn't do its job, simple as that job is, so it says I have driven 218, 000 miles but i am fairly sure it is more than that. In fact i believe that i am closer to the 260k mile mark. I wish it was working effectively because I would love to see it turn over into the 300k mark.
Because of my car I am a big advocate for Honda. this little beast has carried me across the country numerous times, put up with 4 years of reckless driving when i was a Dominos delivery driver, and has given me very litte trouble. So i don't have A/C anymore (again), and two door handles are broken, and the muffler could fall off at anytime (it only cost me $100 under the table), and one window doesn't roll down, and it is beginning to rust. So what? this car is still my beauty. when it is clean and full of gas i feel like a proud mom. i know that i will likely be getting a new car in a year or so but maybe not because I thought this same thought a few years ago when we moved to California and my car has continued to amaze me with its ability to keep running day after day. By the way, my car still has its original brakes on the rear.
well, i never meant to start writing about my car but i did and that's that. what i meant to write about was the trip Carl and I took. it may take me several blogs to get it all in. Basically, we left California on June 3rd. we only made it as far as Anaheim because we went to Disneyland. After spending a month dealing with the details of the move we felt we deserved this. Disneyland was not as magical as i had expected but it was fun. I especially liked Space Mountain (why aren't more rollercoasters in the dark?). I did not like the other mountain ride. i called it the back breaker because the jerkiness of that ride made my back tweak twice. unpleasant and not worth the wait in line. We didn't do any of the rides for kids, except for the teacups and i loved those. we rode all the big rides and i wasn't too impressed by them. they were amusing but we had to wait too long for all of them and it wasn't even a busy day at the park. i worried that we would spend a lot of money on junk food at the park but we only had two things while there-an ice cream bar and a pickle. they were both delicious (and not eaten at the same time).
in all we spent 8 hours at the park and were pooped when we left. we only had enough energy to stop by Buca Di bepo on our way to our hotel. we had the best pizza there. i would recommend it if i could remember what it was. That was day 1 of our trip.

Rock and Roll moving experience

abe ran the rock and roll on sunday. he finished in just under 4 1/2 hours. he was up at 4 am to get to the race on time (and ended up with too much time before the race) and you could tell he was exhausted when he ran past. i had initially planned to see abe at about the 13 mile mark than to go over to the MCRD (military base) to see abe cross the finish but my parents did not show up on time (they say its a long story and i imagine they were fighting so i didn't ask) and we barely missed abe by what we think was 10 minutes so we rushed over to mile 18 and waited. we once again thought we missed abe because we saw a particular man dressed as elvis run past, whom we had seen before at the other mile so we were just leaving when my dad said, "ayi esta" and we turned around in time to see abe about to pass us. we did the whole cheer thing and he came over to us and that was fun than we got in the car and decided to go see him a few miles ahead to cheer him on again. the drive to the next location happened to go side-by-side the marathon so we honked at abe as we drove by (he had been walking at this point). at the next location we waited for awhile, and saw that same elvis again (i think he recognized us by this point because he was encouraging us to cheer when he ran past) and we chilled out until we saw abe run past us one last time. He was only a few miles from the end at this point and still looked to be doing all right. i wish i had gotten to see him at the end but that is life and it didn't work out that way. instead we went home after this. my aunt, cousin, and one of their friends went home to and i ended up napping for two hours because i too had been up since 4 to take abe and my parents left for the beach and carl disappeared to pick up abe.
when they got home, and i got up, we ate some IN n Out and relaxed than we went to the bay with my aunt, cousin, and their friend, and my parents to bbq and enjoy the best that california has to offer. it was very beautiful just chilling at the bay and i am glad we had dinner there instead of at someone's house because it showed my family what i would soon be missing.
on Monday we had to pack up our moving container and something that i thought would take about an hour took over five hours and that was with my parents and abe helping. it was not pleasant and we still had to work on it a little after we dropped abe off at the airport than went out for dinner (and got wasted on giant margaritas) with some good friends (mark, caitlin, jenn, kent, brian, tania, and joel, and a friend of kent's). i will miss them .