The Great Flood and Cold Toesies

**The pics are finally in - enjoy!**

I know, I know, I've been a total slacker in the blogging department lately. I'm mean seriously, I just realized today that I still have my Christmas wallpaper up. But to be fair, I really wasn't on the computer at all during our little vacation, so it's taken me a while to get my reader back under control. I literally had hundreds of new posts (from wonderful people like yourself) that I hadn't read. And of course I couldn't just skip over them - I wanted to read them all, so it took a while. Now I'm finally back to my regular daily reading and I have a few minutes so I thought I would share part one of our holiday adventures (it's going to take a few installments, it was a LONG trip).

The real adventure actually started the night before our planned departure - it rained. Now that doesn't sound so terribly thrilling, or adventure-some, but believe me it was. It poured buckets for about 36 hours straight. Needless to say there are just a little flooding, when we woke up (in case you don't hear my blog in my voice, I'm being sarcastic here - there was a lot of flooding). And it just got worse and worse. I'm SO glad that we live in an apartment on the second floor. Our downstairs neighbors had about 4 inches of water in their place - just everywhere. It was crazy. The elementary school closed, I think BYU would have, too, except it was the last day of finals, so what are you going to do. Here's a few pics I took of the area right around our building.

(You can't really tell if you've never seen it dry, but that lake at the middle-top of the pic is normally a parking lot. There was water up to the top of the tires on some cars before they could get them out.)


(There's one more step down to a sidewalk that runs the length of this "puddle". This is also the edge of the water that is in our building downstairs.)


Here some other blogs and websites with much better pictures, so you can see the magnitude of it all. There was just water EVERYWHERE. The community really pulled together and neighbors that were flooded out were taken care of, houses were sandbagged, hoards of vollunteers were fed and warmed. There's still some damage that it being worked on - I know there are at least a couple of families that haven't been able to return home yet because the damage was so extensive.

Lois's website - she also has great pics from other community events if you feel the desire to browse you might catch my kids in a few here and there.
Ashley's blog - now living in Cali, but she was here for the fun.
Fellow TVA resident - I've never met her, but her family's real cute and she took some AMAZING pictures.

In spite of the flood, we did manage to actually leave as scheduled, but we ended up being rushed, we left earlier than planned to make sure that we could get into Honolulu to the airport - there's only 2 ways around the island from here (North or South - duh) and when one is shut down the other gets really clogged. We were very lucky that there weren't any closures when we went.

After drying off at the airport we boarded a red-eye flight to LAX - when traveling with 4 small children, this is really the way to go. All 4 of them pretty much slept for the whole flight. I didn't even have to break out snacks or anything. Plus we were on one of the newer planes where each seat has its own little TV screen - and while the movie and TV selections weren't working for a small section of the plane (which of course, including our seats) there were games still working that were fun to play, so the 6 1/2 hour flight went by pretty fast.

Once into LA we were totally caught off guard by the cold weather - it was very chilly and us in our Hawaiian shorts and T-shirts. I mean it was Southern California, we didn't think we would need to break out the ski parkas until we got to Utah. But we made it to Cameron's brother's house and spent a really fun day relaxing and playing with cousins.

And then the madness ensues! Seriously, what were we thinking? For Christmas Santa brought the family Southern California City Passes. That's 6 days of themepark fun. Sounds great - and it was, for the most part, but it was a lot to cram into the 10 days that we spent in California. To top it all off, it was cold the entire time. Well, OK, there were 2 completely gorgeous days - the 2 days that we decided NOT to go anywhere so we could recoup. So it goes.