This week, our vacation is driving to Sarah’s sister Lynn’s house in California to pick up her three kids for the summer. They’ll be staying at our house and with their other Utah relatives for a couple of months. We borrowed Judy’s van and packed up our kids on Tuesday morning for the ride.

Tuesday, 06/10/2008 – West Valley City to Reno, NV

What’s with the letter W on this trip? So far we’ve stopped in the towns of Wendover/West Wendover, Wells and Winnemucca. If we weren’t staying in Reno tonight, I’d think we were cursed to see only Ws through the whole trip. Walla Walla, Washington, here we come!

We grabbed dinner at an Indian place a couple of blocks’ walk from the hotel. The food was plentiful and cheap, but Audrey wouldn’t touch most of it. (What else is new?)

Our room at the Atlantis casino and resort is pretty crummy — small, a little bit dingy, and there are at least three different kinds of flying bugs in there — one of which bit me. The pool area was undergoing construction, but we still had fun playing there tonight.

Wednesday, 06/11/2008 – Reno, NV to Crescent City, CA

We stopped at the McDonald’s in Susanville, California for Sarah to feed Nathan. Audrey saw the playland and said, “This place is amazing!”

We’ve worked our way through just about all of the music we had on CD and now I’m playing music from the laptop out through the tape deck adaptor. We’re going to mooch some blank CDs from Lynn when we get to her house tonight and I’ll burn more music for the trip home.

Lynn’s house in Crescent City is just about 20 minutes down U.S. 101 from Redwood National Park. Just before we got here tonight we stopped to take a couple of photos of us by the giant trees. In the one of me, I’m barely a speck next to this massive pillar of wood stretching into the sky. (When we loaded it into the computer and copied and pasted me a few times, we found that it went 13 Curtii high before it went out of the frame — meaning the tree was at least 78 feet tall, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was double that or more.)