We got some sad news that Eric's step mom Shirley passed away. So we made a last minute trip to Utah. We left Wednesday evening. I think we hit every construction zone in Washington state. So it was a little slow going. I drove most of the night shift. We made it into Oregon and pulled into a gas station to fill up on gas. Little did we know that we would not be able to get back on the freeway. Apparently there was a crash and toxic materials spilt on the freeway. So the cops were blocking the on ramp. We tried driving to the next on ramp down. Cops were blocking that too. They told us to just go have breakfast for a while, that there was no way around. So we parked in the McDonalds parking lot and tried to sleep. It was not easy to try and sleep in a cramped car so there wasn't a ton of sleeping. A couple hours later as the sun was coming up we got breakfast. The cops were still blocking the road. So we started checking the road reports. No end in site. And further down on the freeway there was some talk of the road being closed due to a wildfire on the side of the road. So I started looking for an option to drive around instead of going on I-84. I was able to find a road through the national forest that was an hour further drive, but better than sitting in a McDonalds parking lot. So we started driving that way. It was a slower but pretty drive through the forest. We made it through and came out to so small little farming communities and headed toward Idaho on highway 20 through farming country. All of a sudden on the hillside we could see smoke. Then we could see even more smoke. And then we could see a plane dropping fire retardant right of the top of us. I was telling Eric to floor it, and he was asking if he could stop and take pictures. I told him NO. We could see people packing up their cars at their houses. Packing up their livestock. It was scary. We were able to make it out of there just barely. It became a 120 acre wildfire after we made it through. We then made it into Idaho. Things were a bit slow going there as well. It was 109 degrees in Boise. Semi tires were literally igniting on the freeway. So there were a number of more slowdowns. It ended up taking us about 20 hours to get to Utah. That is about 6 hours more than normal. Needless to say we were damn exhausted. It required massive amounts of coffee and snacks to keep me and Eric awake to drive. We didn't get settled into our hotel until 9 and fortunately the restaurant was still open. Not sure how we are going to get home.
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