159/366

Today was my day to pack for our trip to Lake Shasta, and then drive to Lake Shasta. Except that Az was not having it. Every time I tried to put something in her suitcase she quickly pulled it out, though she was perfectly happy to put in items of her choosing, like an empty dirty cup. And when that didn't seem to be deterring my packing she just plopped herself right down into the suitcase. We managed to get out of the house right around the time I wanted to, 9PMish, and then we went to the grocery store to get provisions for our short trip, and then we realized that we had a lot of what we wanted at home already so we went back home and threw those things into a plastic shopping bag (including some yogurt I forgot about until the next afternoon.)

We did eventually get on the road, and took our time driving up to Shasta. Last year on our drive to Oregon Az had been hot and miserable so I had hoped leaving at night, when it would be cool and Az would be inclined to sleep would make things easier. It sort of did, and sort of didn't. She did fine as long as the vehicle was moving, and slept as I had hoped, but whenever I would pull over to take a nap she would wake up confused and angry and not at all in the mood to sleep. I pulled over twice to catch a few winks in rest stops, because there isn't much else on I-5, and Az woke up both times wanting to go walk around the rest stop and explore. I've heard enough horror stories about rest stops that I would literally rather attempt a root canal than wander around one with my almost-two-year-old daughter in the middle of the night. Unlike his daughter Miguel had no trouble sleeping through our stops, and was in fact extremely resistant to waking up so I spent most of the night throwing a cranky Az back into her seat and driving until she was asleep and content again.

Z, by the way, handled the ride like a champ. He's never had much trouble with traveling. When he was younger I considered long drives with him my special vacation before the official vacation because he was content to just look at the passing scenery and amuse himself. When he was around two and three years old we ended up taking almost monthly trips to Los Angeles, about an eight hour ride, largely because of this.

Due to the not stopping for as long as I had planned we arrived at the marina at around six in the morning. Which meant we had to wait in the hot car for over five hours until the rest of our party arrived. The whole point of leaving late at night was to avoid sitting in a hot car. When I tried to walk around with Az she quickly became irritated with me for not letting her go down by the boats without her life jacket. I think next time we'll just go ahead and leave early in the morning. It's a pain trying to get everyone awake and into the car but it's not a bigger pain than juggling a hot and cranky toddler.