I was all excited when Tom suggested we meet him and Brianna at my Mother's on Sunday afternoon, while Laurel went to a bridal shower. We got on the road early and were looking forward to seeing everyone when we came to this.
The road that goes from Highway 80, which we take from Davis, to Highway 101, where my mother is goes across the delta on Highway 37, a 2 lane road (one lane in each direction). On a normal day it takes about 30 minutes and traffic moves pretty well.
This weekend, however, they were having the Indy Grand Prix of Sonoma and the only way to get there was to take Highway 37. Infineon Raceway is somewhere beyond that "x" and it was obviously going to take us forever to get there (the race is such a big deal that Danica Patrick was there...). Fortunately, from this point, we had not yet reached the point of no return, so Walt decided to turn around and go back from whence we had come, drive farther down 101 and take the Richmond Bridge. When we turned around, this is what we saw.
The backup from where we had come was not much longer.
Taking the bridge was not exactly a shortcut, and it took us two hours total to get to my mother's, where it normally takes an hour. But Tom and Laurel weren't there yet. When I called them on their cell phone I discovered that they were stuck in the racetrack traffic. It was another 30 minutes before they arrived.
But they did arrive and I gave Bri the toys we'd brought her from Russia, which she seemed to like.
Laurel raced off to her friend's bridal shower while we had lunch with my mother, after which Ga-Ga (Bri's name for my mother) served ice cream cones.
(she wasn't sure about the chocolate chips!)
We decided to try to wear her out, so we took off for the playground, which was at the far end of the lagoon near my mother's house. Everyone had a great time, especially Bri. In The Music Man Harold Hill asks Tommy Djilas if he ever played around with perpetual motion. "I almost had it a couple of times," Tommy says. Well, if Tommy had been able to harness Miss Bri's energy today, he could finally have succeeded! She never stopped.
She kept Grandpa and Daddy running around, doing her bidding for at least half an hour. (Incidentally, she was afraid to swing in Tom's lap unless he held her, which made it difficult for him to pump the swing, so Walt pushed his kid on the swing while his kid held his kid! I loved this photo!)
The Video of the Day shows the circuit that Bri made at this little playground. Up on structure, down one side, up another structure, down another slide, onto a bouncing frog and then back to the first structure again. She did this at least a couple of dozen times -- long after Daddy and Grandpa were tired!
Eventually she was getting tired, so we completed the loop around the lagoon, heading back to Ga-Ga's house.
I'm sure Brianna would have gone to sleep right away, but they had to keep her awake until Laurel got back from the bridal shower, so she would sleep in the car.
(I should add parenthetically that I know some will complain that there are no pictures of me with Bri and that's because I was the one taking the photos. Jeri keeps telling me to put the camera down and get involved, BUT taking pictures is what I do and what I enjoy AND this was the very first time in her life that Bri came up to me and asked to sit in my lap so she could look at the pictures of herself in the camera.)
Walt and I left shortly after Tom et al. and, knowing we would get the raceway crowd going home if we tried to take 37 again, Walt decided to take an alternate route. Unfortunately, the alternate route took us by the back entrance to the race track and it didn't save us any time at all. We crept along at 5 mph for long stretches of the road and in the end, it took us more than 2 hours to get home.
I'm not going anywhere near a car tomorrow...and I wasn't even driving!
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