The Road to LiG 2012

1. Nexus is AWESOME. Get NEXUS, people. We drove past hundreds of cars up to the kiosk, border guard  looks at us, says "That's the  face" to Gemma sitting in the front, and then "Have a good day", waving us through. Easy peasy.

2. Frank and Ronnie's is a pretty good mail order delivery house. The service is good. We picked up 3 ebay/Amazon deliveries there on our way down to LiG, and were lucky enough to get a prelude of a weekend with Frank, I got to offload some of my cynicism to a partner in crime! Matteo now has a Decepticon belt buckle, I have Life is Good "business" cards, and we have a  32gb Compact Flash Card that needs its own backpack. Man those old memory cards are huge! Matteo made sure to tell me that my the grammar on my "business" cards was incorrect and that his name is now Matteo Gemma Gioia Aliana  and Viola, because I didn't use any commas. I needed it all to fit on one line!!!! Geesh.

3. Matteo is no longer an I-5 virgin. He successfully maneuvered the van with 6 people and loads of stuff from Bellingham to Everett and for the last hour into Vancouver, Washington. We'll have to work on getting through the Seattle portions. Shall I say "I" will have to work on letting go....and letting him get to it!

 Driving behind a giant truck being pulled by a tow truck is rather disturbing.

 

4. Left Matteo and Aliana at Jimmy John's at the Everett Mall so the rest of us could go get some Trader Joe's items. Came back and Aliana was wearing Matteo's big sweater, as he gave it to her when she got cold. They looked so adorable together that we made them stand in front of the door to Jimmy John's so we could take a picture. While getting the camera ready the staff behind the sandwich counter were wildly laughing and flailing their arms trying to get in the picture. We consider this an omen that this weekend will be FUN!

If you look closely you can see behind the glass the staff trying to get in the picture. If you can't see, that's okay,  I know it's true!

5. I observed that Eminem on the iPod through the car speakers can co-exist beautifully with 9 year old twins singing 99 bottles of beer on the wall. Oh, and it didn't end at 0 bottles of beer on the wall, they delved into "negative one bottles of beer on the wall, negative one bottles of beer"! Take that, math!

6. They call them Sour Keys, but I'd say I ate my first sour tire. Gioia bought a bag full of these wretched candies and I decided to be brave. I sucked off the sour bits, made some apparently hilarious faces, chewed for a while and then decided I'd like my fillings to stay IN my teeth for now, and spat the leftover tire bit out.

I'd say this was a FANTASTIC first day of our trip!