BlizzCon 2010, Part Two: The Road Trip Begins!

As of the last post, Mr. L and I had safely arrived in California and then we crashed at Joe's house for the rest of the night.

The next morning, we woke up a little later than we originally wanted to (probably due to that 2 1/2 hour extra drive we hadn't planned on!) and then the guys left to go pick up our rental car.  I never snapped a picture of it for some reason, but it was just a standard model white Chevy Cobalt:

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It obviously wasn't anything fancy, but it was just perfect for carrying us and our luggage for this roughly 1000 mile trip!

Oh, wait, I haven't mentioned the distance already?  Yeah, the driving portion of this trip was about 1000 to 1100 miles long, and that doesn't even include the driving we did from Santa Clarita to Anaheim and back for the two days of Blizzcon and the day before to pick up our tickets.  To put it into perspective, that's about the distance from Sacramento to Denver, CO one-way:

Click to enlarge -- screenshot via MapQuest

And we drove that in about a day and a half total, after looking back on it.  We actually were originally planning on doing MORE driving, but I'll get to that later on in the recaps.

So after the guys came back with our road trip car, we talked about what time we wanted to get on the road.  I think we ended up deciding to leave around the early afternoon, which left us with enough time to get some lunch.  After some debate over where we would eat (and by debate I mean Mr. L claiming to not care where we ate but vetoing any specific kind of restaurant that Joe mentioned), we stopped at a place called The Elephant Bar.

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Overall, it was a nice restaurant with lots of different kinds of food to choose from -- the main reason why Joe picked it for us.  We opted to eat off of their Chinese-style portion of the menu, so Mr. L and I split the crispy chicken teriyaki plate.  We both definitely enjoyed it!

Definitely getting hungry now!

After lunch, we headed back to the house to get our luggage together and stored in the car, and then our road trip officially began!

In the beginning of our planning a few months back, we had lots of ideas for what exactly we wanted to do on this trip.  Unfortunately, we didn't take into account that Mr. L only had a minimal number of days of leave available to him for this vacation.  We ended up getting only seven days to fly to California, drive to Anaheim, attend two whole days of BlizzCon, drive back up to Sacramento, and fly back home to Florida.  So to at least do something we originally wanted to, Joe drove us over the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco!

The approach!

View from behind!

We got to see downtown San Francisco as well -- I thought it was pretty, mostly because I'm a sucker for the architecture :)

After passing through downtown San Francisco, we meandered our way onto Interstate 5 and tried to keep ourselves entertained for the remainder of the drive, which was probably close to six hours or so.  That part of the drive was pretty boring, mainly because it seemed like the scenery never changed.  As Mr. L put it, it basically looked like the Barrens:

Sorry for the hazy I-took-this-through-a-car-window quality!

After doing our best to keep Joe awake at the wheel, we rolled into Santa Clarita and checked into our hotel.

Our Courtyard by Marriott hotel in the light of day

We'd finally made it!  Now we just had to get up in the morning and make the drive into Anaheim to pick up our badges for the Con over the weekend, so we promptly went to bed :)

Up Next:  

• BlizzCon 2010, Part Three:  Badge Pick-Up Day

Previous Posts:

• BlizzCon 2010, Part 1: Journey to the West Coast