Tonight's date night so I'll keep it short (Don's picking up a movie and pot stickers for us).  We took our family trip of the century a couple weeks ago.  I loaded up the kids and headed to Oregon to see my grandmother who was dieing of cancer.  We broke down twice on the way (in CA) and never made it to Oregon and my grandmother ended up dieing before we could get there anyway.  After the repairs to the Suburban, the hotel stays (among a lot of other little expenses) and the rental Don had to get to come get us.  We ended up paying nearly $4k for the worst trip we've ever taken.  I was beginning to think we were never going to get home.  But we're back now and our income is slowly, very slowly recovering - as am I.  One thing's for sure, unless we're going straight to the beach and back, I'll NEVER go through CA again - the roads are downright ridiculous!!  We did get a couple pictures of the kids near the beach just north of Santa Barbara.