The Big Move Home: Day 5

Day 5 Route: Klamath Falls, OR to Oakdale, CA

Pictures: The Big Move Home: Day 5

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Day 5 By The Numbers

	Day 5	Total
Miles Driven	384.8	1,274.7
Time in Car*	6:38	28:37
New State License Plates Seen	3	21
Diapers Changed	9	37
Money Spent on Gas	$116.43	$224.11
National Parks Visited	0	2

*According to the car's trip computer

Day 5 was about as uneventful of a day that you could have on a road trip. I'll even summarize the day in one paragraph. We left our hotel Klamath Falls around 11am (as usual). Fin promptly decided to give us a Code Yellow Blowout, which is rare, but just as devastating as its Code Brown counterpart. We changed his outfit, grabbed some Taco Time (more on this in a minute), then started driving. It was rainy and windy, then just windy, then some more rain, then just windy again. It was nice to set the cruise control at 80mph and cover a lot of ground, but it wasn't very exciting. We only took about 20 pictures (as compared to the 70+ on other days), and our family portrait for the day was taken in our hotel room. I have a feeling we'll have more days like this as we drive through the Southwest next week, too. In the end, we were successful in reaching our destination of Oakdale to set us up for our drive to Yosemite on Day 6.

Technically, I've just given the description of the day in one paragraph, but I've got a little side story that deserves its own. The astute reader will notice that we were headed for Stockton, CA on Day 5, but ended up in Oakdale, instead. Along the way Jess decided to look up our hotel on TripAdvisor. I'm not sure what prompted us to do this, as we hadn't really checked reviews on the trip yet and I wasn't overly worried about Stockton. I should have been.

All eight reviews about the Stockton Days Inn are 'Terrible'. There's some great stuff in there: hookers, beer cans floating in the black pool, busted out windows, people walking through the parking lot trying door handles, and blood in the hallways. Needless to say, we canceled our stay there and decided to motor on to Oakdale, which gets us closer to Yosemite. I'm sure glad Jess decided to look up those reviews - you can bet we'll be doing that on a daily basis from now on.

Now, back to Taco Time. In Klamath Falls, Jess said she really felt like grabbing Taco Time for lunch, which was fine with me. As those of you midwesterners can guess, Taco Time is a fast food Mexican place that's a little healthier than Taco Bell (there's more lettuce on stuff). As we drove up to the restaurant, we noticed that something looked a little off, and the menu seemed to have the same items, but the pictures were different. We ordered our food and ate, but things were definitely different. The chicken was in much smaller chunks, taco salad bowl was much smaller, the 'sour cream' they usually have (a mix of sour cream and ranch that Jess loves) was just normal sour cream, and the Mexi-nuggets weren't quite as Mexi. I told Jess to write a note for me to look this up for the blog.

As far as I can tell, Washington Taco Time is a completely different company from everywhere-else Taco Time. It seems they were created decades ago and have similar menus, but that's about it. They're both franchised, which makes it weird. What if one state had different McDonald's than everywhere else? Anyway, that's your lesson for the day -- never trust a Taco Time.

I think that when an update includes a story about almost visiting a scary hotel and a hard-hitting exposé on regional fast food differences, you'd come to the same conclusion that we did: Day 5 was uneventful.

Tomorrow: Heading to Yosemite for the day, then stopping in Fresno.