Odenwalder Family Road Trip and Barfarama

What do you get when you caravan in two minivans with 15 people from Washington to California and one person gets sick?  You get the Odenwalder family road trip barfarama!  But wait I'm ahead of myself....

 

Wednesday night 1/14-Sean, Amy, Diana, Kirk, Heidi, Camille, Ellie and Claire set off for Washinton...they arrive sometime on Friday.

Saturday morning 1/17- Peter, Me, Connor, Chloe, Mary, Oliver and Calvin fly to Seattle.  Yes a 3 hour flight sounded much better than a 22 hour car ride.  We arrive at the Seattle airport and Peter realizes he never got an email from the car rental place.  Mary calls both car rental places in Tacoma and nobody has our reservation.  Peter insists he saw a confirmation number but didn't print it out.  Mary asks if they have a minivan available and they do...it'll cost $2000...Yikes!  That's a lot more than the $740 we thought we made the reservation for.  The guy on the other end of the line does some magic, puts in every discount possible and gets us down to $860, fine we'll take it.  Sean picks us all up at the airport and takes us to the car rental place.  Then we go to the house Sean and Amy were staying at and pick up the rest of Mary's kids.  Mary and her kids go to the hotel, while Sean, Amy and us go to a glass museum.  It was pouring cats and dogs and we left our umbrellas in the car...we got a bit wet.

 Blown glass-the lower one is on the ceiling of an outdoor bridge.

This is also in the glass museum.  

The guys found these cool light up letters and started playing with them.

Saturday evening we went back to the hotel.  Mary and I ran out for Chinese food and then we ate and went to sleep.

Sunday 1/18-Morning-We got up, got dressed and went down to the lobby for breakfast.  The hotel was clearly not well populated and the staff had put out minimal plates, napkins, bowls etc.   All over the place were signs telling you not to take food back to your room- $50-150 charge...seriously!  We were not fond of the place, and to make matters worse we tried to cancel our reservation for the following night and since we booked through hotels.com it was up to the hotel manager whether or not we could get refunded the money...it ended up being the most expensive hotel stay and clearly the lousiest!  Also Sunday morning Oliver threw up his bottle at 5am and 7am and more during breakfast...Later in the morning Sean and Amy came to get us and we all went to the Space Needle.  Mary and her crew went up, while the rest of us walked around the area.  It was very overcast and sprinkling so I didn't think it was worth the cost to go up and see fog, and neither did anybody else who decided to stay down as well.

 It was really chilly at the Space Needle

While waiting for the others we walked by these flowers that made music, they were interesting.

Once the others were done we hopped back in the cars and drove to Grandpa Calomeni's memorial (the reason we all went to Washington in the first place).  It was by far different than any other memorial service I've experienced and from what I've heard that's the way he would've liked it.  His favorite foods were prepared: bratwurst, sausages, pecan ice cream and beer.  Though most of us ate the cold cuts, chips, potato salad and root beer.  On a big screen in the middle of a room was the Seattle Sea Hawks game playing.  Off to the side was a slideshow of Grandpa's life...Our family was in one picture with Grandpa when we visited them when Connor was 8 months old.  Chloe never got to meet her great grandpa, but she'll hear plenty of stories about him when she's older-he was quite the character.  During halftime the game was muted and people shared stories and experiences.  When the game resumed people continued to socialize with one another and others left.  We decided to leave as the kids were having a hard time sitting still by that point.

From there we went to Pike's Place Market.  We were in front of the famous flying fish stand when the Sea Hawks scored a touchdown and the place erupted with cheering, yelling and dancing.  Chloe did not like this kind of wake up call.  While we were still there they also won the game and everyone cheered...it was a full blown party there.

Sunday night we caught a ferry over to Sequim where Grandpa and Sherry lived. We had a great time with Sherry. 

Monday 1/19- We set off from Sherry's house and drove to Olympic National Park visitor center.  Here they had a room for kids and it was awesome!  Then we went to the Hoh rainforest.  It was sprinkling, cold and very moist.  We went on the Hall of Mosses trail.

 What a cute little boy!

We loved looking at all the moss hanging from the trees.

 Some trees had these mushroom like things growing on the sides of them.

At night we went to a cabin on the beach.  After feeding dinner to the kids Calvin walked by me with his hands over his mouth and something obviously coming out.  I grabbed him and got him off the carpet and almost onto the kitchen floor when he puked...it was lovely.  He apparently puked several more times during the night and was found sleeping on the couch with his mom in the morning.

Tuesday 1/20- We walked along the beach of the cabin we stayed at and found this dead shark, a couple of sand dollars and some neat shells.

 We started to leave, but then someone had to go to the bathroom so we stopped at this cute little park and let the kids romp a little bit.

 Then we went to this fun maritime museum.  The kids had a great time here.

Chloe was really funny about this plexiglass part.  For the longest time she wouldn't walk out on it, and then when Ellie carried her out on it she quickly returned to solid looking ground.  I was excited to see her crawl out to see what Ellie was looking at.

 Calvin and Connor enjoyed talking on the phones.

 From there we then stopped at the Goonies house and took a picture.

 The jail in the movie was down the street so we stopped there too.

 The Flavel House

 We ended the night going to a fish and chips place and then to our guest house.  This was the sign out front...it was pretty cool.    Now remember Sunday how Oliver puked, then Calvin puked multiple times during the night Monday night....well now we're at Tuesday night and the great barfarama begins...Mary was feeling queasy at the restaurant and makes Peter stop the car twice so she can hurl on the side of the road.  She gets to the guest house and goes to bed, only to get up several times during the night to heave.  Most of the family stays up to watch Goonies that night and my family decides to go to bed.   At 1:30 Chloe pukes all over our bed.  Peter cleans her, while I clean the bed.  I then know there's one extra room left and pop my head in it to find Heidi asleep on top of several towels...yup she had puked too.  Great now what are we to do?  I cleaned up the mess the best I could but it was still all over the place, so we put the sheet over it and flip to the other side of the bed and have our feet down by the puke end.  This seems to work, we are just barely all settled back in and I hear the pitter patter of footsteps coming down the stairs, the bathroom door opens and then yep you guessed it, Ellie is vomiting.  Peter helps her, gives her a pot and she heads back upstairs to bed. 

Wednesday 1/21-Sometime in the morning Claire upchucks and then Sean who had been feeling queasy the night before makes a run for the bathroom.  Before breakfast 8 out of 15 in our crew had puked.

We pack up, clean up, tell the management that some of the children got the stomach flu and went on our way as fast as possible to the next hotel.  We were supposed to go to the Columbia River Gorge, but that would've been 3 hours out of our way and with more than half the crew sick we decided to skip it and get to the next hotel as fast as we could.  On our way out we stopped at a grocery store and bought pitchers, plastic bags (to make puke buckets for each car), gatorade and pedialite.

 The car I was in was feeling okay, at that point only Sean and Chloe had puked so they were still a bit under the weather but everyone else felt fine.  We stopped at this beach and let the kids romp around.  Chloe napped in the car and Sean didn't want to leave the car so he stayed with her.  Amy, Kirk, Heidi, Camille, Connor and I ran around.  The other car made several stops along the way to visit bathrooms...Diana had the sickness coming out the other end :(

 After we made it to the hotel we left the sick ones in bed and the rest of us, or those of us who were feeling better went out to look at some tide pools.  This is Alligator Rock.  The whole beach was made out of large rounded cobble stones.  It was quite difficult to walk in, but we saw some awesome tide pools.

We had fun touching sea anemones and watching them close up.

 Sea stars and urchins

 A panorama view of the tide pools.

Back at the hotel some of the kids felt better and joined the rest of us at the pool and spa for some water time.  Later that night Kirk joined the list of pukers.

Thursday 1/22-As all the sick ones heard of our adventures tide pooling and were seriously jealous, we went off in search of more tide pools to look at.  Sadly none were nearly as cool as what we saw, but they were still tide pools.

 Group photo

 Calvin and Connor were being nice to each other

 Seals/Sea Lions all over this rock

We went to Sea Lion Cave

We went down an elevator 200 feet to the Sea Lion Cave.

 A nice waterfall

 After the experience everyone got some popcorn for the car ride.  Chloe really liked the popcorn.

 Next we went and played at some sand dunes.  The kids had a great time climbing and running down the dunes.  Chloe made sand angels.

 Looking at more tide pools.

Thursday night we had two hotel rooms with three beds each.  Peter, Connor, Chloe and I got a king bedroom and it was connected to Sean and Amy's room of two queen beds.  In the middle of the night Connor became #11 to puke.

Friday 1/23- We drove to the Redwoods

 Connor by a fallen tree

 I wish I took this picture better...the girls are standing in between two trees that have toppled over.

 After this we tried to go see a glass beach, but the internet told us to go to a state park and it wasn't there.  We arrived just before sunset, barely before the park closed and were disappointed.  The ride there was eventful and nearly everyone got carsick.  Calvin got sick in the morning and threw up roughly 5 times in the car.  In the car I was in, Connor lost it twice.  The road was extremely twisty, we all nearly lost it.  When we got back in the car Connor and I shared the last motion sickness tablet and were much better the rest of the way to the hotel. 

 Saturday 1/24- We drove to Point Reyes...at the visitor center we took an earthquake trail.  During an earthquake in 1989 I think...the fence that Ellie is holding onto moved 16 feet.

 An inside view of the lighthouse

 The 308 steps we had to walk down to the lighthouse...and yes you guessed it the 308 steps we then had to climb up...oh it was awful!  I could've totally skipped this part of the trip, I don't think it was worth all those steps.

 We took a bus to the lighthouse and then another bus to sea these...they are elephant seals.  I zoomed my camera in the best I could, but we were really far away.  We got much closer to elephant seals when we went to Hearst Castle before we had Connor (like 10-20 feet away)...We told Amy this and now she's interested in going...perhaps we'll go again this summer.

After this our car load headed for home.  Diana, Mary and her kids headed to Sacramento which was only 3 hours away to visit Mary's parents. 

Sunday 1/25-Our car load arrived home at 2:30am...we were exhausted!...I'm glad we took a day to relax because we are still exhausted!

So there you have it the Odenwalder Road Trip and Barfarama where 11 out of 15 people got sick.  The lucky ones to avoid (so far) the plague: Me, Peter, Amy and Camille.