Happy New Year! We’re home! Hallelujah! Phew, am I glad to be home! I could almost kiss my dirty rug. (If you’ve seen my rug you know that “almost” is the key word there). Not because I didn’t have a fabulous time, because we did, but because I am SICK of traveling with a toddler! What is the deal with two-year-olds?

Baby Bug was a very good little girl. She smiled and chattered like the darling that she is but every once in a while, probably every four hours or so (when she was hungry or tired or bored) she would wail and carry on and pitch a fit in that particular frequency that makes my eyes roll back in my head and my ears bleed.

I don’t know if it was all her. It was just something that I did not deal very well with while traveling. I didn’t have all my old stand-by’s to make me feel better when stressed. No random walks to starbucks or the beach. No nice two hour baby naps that I could spend blogging or surfing the net—which is really my outlet. Forget knitting or reading romance novels. If I want to relax it’s right here on this web page

It was super nice to hang out with relatives and have her be entertained by somebody other than me but I just needed my home or something. And the traveling! Oh man. I am sick of my car. I love my car but if I have to look at it for another minute over the next two days I think I will puke. I’m walking every where I have to go for a week because I cannot bear to drive.

We took the small car instead of the van. The small car is super fun to drive and is suprisingly more comfortable… but… well, it’s small! And of course I was the mom who is attached to her baby at the hip so I rode in the back seat all cramped up instead of the front seat with lots and lots of leg room. I should not complain. It’s my own fault my legs were cramped between suitcases and pillows and my bag of snacks. But you try playing pacifier tag for eight hours straight and see if you want to sit in the front seat.

Throwing the pacifier was Baby Bug’s favorite form of entertainment during the drive. It was called, “Throw the Pah Down the Crack.” The crack would be any crevice beside her car seat that I can’t reach. I know you are thinking it’s about time she gave up the blankety-blank binky but if you had to live with the shrill complaining that I do, you’d probably be like me and plan on buying enough “pahs” to last until her college graduation. So I sat as close as possible, stocked up on about fifty pahs and tucked blankets and jackets in all possible directions so the thrown pahs would roll down to a point that I could reach them and plug them back into her mouth.

I know. I’m insane. Which is possibly why I am so glad to be home. The pah obsession doesn’t seem so bad at home. We usually manage to keep it to bed time and riding in the car… but all rules were out the window during our travels. I don’t know if it’s because she’s teething (as always) or if it was because we were in new and strange places and she missed her routine but the pah was at times the only thing that comforted her so Pah Tag I did play.

Enough about that. You want to hear about the last two days of our trip, right? There’s not much to report I’m afraid. We left Trinidad, loaded up about eighty boxes of gifts for Baby Bug from the Grandparents (she is sooooooooo spoiled!) and headed to Sonoma County in search for our future new home town.

We were a tiny bit disappointed. Toby found this town, that I’ll call Woodsville, that looked right out of a story book on google earth. It had a river and some hills and lots and lots of trees. It was close to Napa Valley which would provide work for Toby but still far enough from the sprawl of San Francisco to guarantee that we didn’t have to sit in three hours of traffic every day. It seemed somewhat affordable according to some houses that were for sale that we looked at over the internet. Maybe that should have been a clue. Nothing is affordable in California unless it is a dump.

I even found one house on the map that was on a windy little road that lead right to an elementary school. It was perfect in our minds. I was so ready to fall in love with this town. I thought sure we’d drive in, have a cup of coffee in some quaint little coffee shop and before I knew it I’d be making friends with my next play group mom.

Heh. Woodsville was not our dream town. It was dark and scary and along a windy two lane road that I would never want to be caught driving down on a rainy night, let alone a snowy one. Don’t even get me started on how far away a hospital might be… Maybe I’m just not cut out for the sticks yet. It was terrible.

The locals rode our bumper and shook their fists at us because obviously we were dumb tourists driving slow and taking photos of grape vines and stuff. When we did pull over to admire the view, there was trash dumped over the embankment. Who dumps their old couches and refrigerators along the side of the road? Why do people do this? It just makes me sad.

I wanted to fall in love with this place but the trash dumping was like a fly in the ointment. Mostly it was just a dark dirty place. The houses were built on stilts over looking the river which I thought would be really neat but in person they seemed scary and rotting and dank. Everything looked like it needed a good dry-out in the sun but there was no sun because the trees grew so thick. I think if we lived here we would be battling mold until the end of time.

How depressing to be writing about such an ugly place while showing photos that are actually quite pretty. I should have taken some depressing photos but at the time I was still trying to love this place. Maybe that’s why I didn’t take very many photos. The love just wasn’t there.

I do love little acorns though. Aren’t they cute with their little nut hats? I got a kick out of showing Baby Bug her first acorn. The good news is, oaks grow in more than one place than Dark Dank Woodsville. They grow all over in fact! So we drove to the next town over and guess what! We loved it! We didn’t get to explore much because it was dinner time for a cranky toddler but we did get to take this beautiful photo of a sunset.

I’m not going to say where the new story-book possible future town is. This time, if we move I’m going to try and keep my location somewhat mysterious because as it is now google knows everything about me and it is downright scary. Also, we might not even move here. It’s all part of a five year plan that is just in the very beginning research and development steps. We have about five towns we are investigating and this one is just barely in the top spot. So don’t get excited. Nothing new is happening for quite a while.

But it doesn’t hurt to dream!