Oh Leaf, thank you so much!! If I hadn't already gone on the trip and come back all right, this post would have made me so much more comfortable on the drive!!  Thank you so much!!!!  Thankfully, we did have an audio book, it was one I read before too, so I knew I would love the story!  And, we never ended up using the chains anyway.  But the drive up was really quite nerve wracking!

Firstly, we went for probably fourty miles with our gas tank blinking and chiming empty!!!!  I was literally holding my breath for most of that bit!  Oh, it was so scary!  We kept passing gas stations that were closed, and not know when we would come across another!

Then a while later after we thank goodness found a wonderful gas station and filled up quite thoroughly, it got dark (we were a bit delayed in driving because of the gas dilemma), and there was black ice, and we couldn't go slow enough to put on the chains because the traffic around us was going about forty, and I guess you have to be under thirty to put them on or something....  Thank goodness again my dad said he learned to drive in that kind of weather, and he's one of the safest drivers I know, and I don't know why I ever doubted him.  Then, a while later, we finally reached the area we wanted, and we missed our exit, and had to turn around in a chain removal place that was so full of snow that we got stuck and nearly didn't make it out of there.

Eventually we reached the place, and spent a wonderful time there with our lovely family, and the drive home was fine.  But boy oh boy, I never want to relive that nightmare!!!  I said to my parents, 'next time, we're flying, I don't care how much it costs!'.  :)

 Oh yes, and we left home around seven thirty in the morning, and got there around six thirty at night.  UGH!  And that was with almost no stops.

Scary. 

So thank you sooo sooo sooo much, what you said means a lot to me! 

I'm from Ca too, as you probably know.