Washington Trip

     This post is a little late but I have had issues with Blogger uploading photos lately.  I finally figured it out.      
     The first weekend in January David and I headed to Washington to find a house.  We had a few memorable moments that we wanted to blog about to remember them.  We figured it would be about a 13 hour drive to Monroe so we left Thursday morning at about 7:15.  We planned on driving straight through and getting there about 7:30 their time.  That wasn't meant to be.  Everything was going good, we had been driving for about 9 hours and we had about 4 hours to go when all the warning lights on the dashboard turned on.  We were kind of in the middle of no-where Washington so David hurried and called my dad with my cell phone and I used his phone to google the nearest Auto Zone.  My dad said that could be caused my a number of things and luckily the nearest Auto Zone was only about 5 miles away...We just hoped the car would keep running until we got there.  We made it to Auto Zone in Toppenish, Washington, and one of the employees came out to test the car.  They can't test the alternator while it is still on the engine but he checked the charging system and according to the readings the alternator was going out.  They had a new alternator and David started taking the old one off.

     We were hoping it would be easy to change but that wasn't the case.  In order to get it off David had to take off the radiator...I was the official flash light holder. :)  We were just glad that when they tested the alternator in the store it was bad.  We ended up being in the Auto Zone parking lot for 2 1/2 hours.  We were definitely the minority in this town but everyone was really nice.  When we finally finished getting the car put back together it was about 6:30.  It was frustrating knowing that if we wouldn't have had car issues we would have been about an hour and a half away.  Oh well, at least it wasn't anything too major and that we were able to fix it on our own and be on the road again.  We drove for about an hour to Ellensburg and decided to stop and eat dinner and get a hotel for the evening.

     We left the next morning at about 8:45.  To get to Monroe you have to go over Snoqualmie Pass and it was snowing/raining and really slick for the next hour and a half or so.  The 3 lane highway was down to 2 lanes and moving really slow.  We got stopped for avalanche control but we only had to wait for about 5 minutes till we were moving again.

     We had an appointment at 1:00 to see a house that we found on Craigslist.  We met the wife and we loved the house and are hoping that they will let us rent it.  We found out last Saturday that we got the house!  We are so excited.  The house is super cute and really clean.  Its out in the country and takes about 15 minutes to get into town.  It will be an adjustment for us but we are excited.  

     Friday afternoon we met with a realtor who gave us a few other options but right now there really aren't a lot of options to buy or rent in the Redmond area.  Friday night we talked to the husband that owns the rental house and he wanted to meet us and talk in person so we set up a time Saturday morning.  After we talked to him Saturday it sounded promising and since we didn't have any other houses to look at we decided to head home.  It was 11:45 when we were on the road back home.

     At about 12:30 I told David that I needed to go to the bathroom but that I could wait for a little bit.  We were getting close to the pass again and this time the road was really bad and it was snowing pretty good so I was ok with waiting till we got over the pass and into some better weather.  When we finally got out of the snow David just kept driving past town after town.  I reminded him again that I needed to go to the bathroom and asked him to stop at the next town.  We went another 40 miles, again he kept driving, another 40 miles, still kept driving, by this time I was getting frustrated but it was also funny.  He really wanted to get home!  Finally, 4 hours after I told him the first time that I needed to go to the bathroom, he pulled over.  Here's the funny part...about 5 minutes after we got back in the car I told David, "Just so you know, I'm starting to get hungry so we might need to stop soon."  He just laughed and of course we drove for another 3 hours before he finally pulled off the freeway to get dinner!  Love him!!!  We ended up driving all the way home and got home at 2:30 Sunday morning. 
     Another thing that happened when we were driving over the pass was that the windshield wiper fluid squiter thing on the driver's side froze.  Of course it was the driver's side that stopped working.  David would squirt the wiper fluid for a few minutes so that the passenger side wiper would push some of the wiper fluid over to the driver's side.  As soon as we got out of the pass the drive'rs side started working fine again.  Washington doesn't use salt on the roads like Utah, they use sand instead so this is how clean the car looked by the time we got home.  We need a car wash!

     My parents watched Adilynne for the weekend while we were gone and they said she did great.  She was happy and slept good.  The first day that we were gone she figured out how to roll over from her back to her belly.  By the time we got home 4 days later she was a pro at rolling over.  When we went over Sunday afternoon to pick her up she was playing with her feet and they were so cute I couldn't resist taking a picture.