West Coast - Day 0

I just realized I have unknowingly betrayed my status in geekdom by starting each trip count at zero. Only mathematicians and computer scientists start counting at zero. Anyway, tomorrow we leave on a three week road trip out to Oregon, northern California and Washington. We plan on going down through the US to Oregon, then down to northern California, then up to Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary and finally home.

Sandra and I had originally discussed a shorter version of this trip last year (basically just to Seattle and area) before the opportunity to go to Mexico arrived, so we brushed off the "plans" this year and expanded them a little. I put plans in quotation marks because we have done remarkably little planning for this trip. We have received a bunch of tourist brochures from the states we will be going to, have a vague idea of the direction we will be traveling and a few actual places that we do want to visit. I think the plan is to review the brochures each night in the hotel in order to plan the next day or two of the trip. That should be possible, as with the two boys in the car, we won't be spending the entire day driving. I would be surprised if we drove more than six hours a day.

I have been remarkably unmotivated for this trip and the events of the past week have not helped. On Tuesday night, I was carrying Evan downstairs when I missed the last step and sprained my ankle. I managed to not drop him, but my ankle hurt horribly until Wednesday afternoon. Since then I have been able to walk on it without any pain, though it is swollen and bruised, and it just added another thing to worry about - for awhile I was concerned that I would not be able to drive, let alone walk around at the various places we will be stopping at.

In addition to that, the kids have been remarkably unmanageable this past week. Evan throws a screaming fit every time he doesn't get what he wants, and Xander refuses to obey the simplest of commands, resulting in screaming fits when he is put in timeout or forced to go to bed. I'm sure things will be fine once we are on the road, since Xander is already super excited about the vacation, though I don't really think he knows what it actually entails - no Lego Star Wars II to play, for instance.

Finally, work has stressed me out a bit in the past week, with two website implementations in three days, including one today on my final day of work. Today was more than a little fun, since I made a mistake in a configuration file which resulted in the execution of the backout plan (that I foolishly told all my superiors was ready to go, but I could not see it being required) and an extremely busy morning and early afternoon. Of course that was a bit of an improvement over the first implementation that saw us bring down a production system for around 15 minutes. *sigh* - Programming is only fun until you have to implement your code. My "second" job is also causing me stress, as due to a lack of resources, I am forced to take my computer and cell phone with me on vacation and provide support while in the US. Normally, this would not be a big deal, as I have gone up to three months without a support call in the past, but the past couple weeks have been abnormally busy, and I'm worried that that will carry over into my vacation.

All of this has combined into making me wish I could just stay home and relax for a vacation, but I'm sure I am just being overly worried about things and that the entire trip will go fine. It always does.