You know how yesterday I was hitting refresh over and over on the site that listed all county road closures? Good thing I did. Around 2:30 yesterday afternoon, I saw that not only was my normal route flooded, but even my detour had flooded. (I knew it was possible, I saw the water rising when I drove across that bridge on my way to work.) I mentioned it to my manager, and he told me that I should go home because traffic was going to get crazy. I told him that depending on road conditions, I may not be in the office today, and he said that was fine.

(Please, I’m going to be there for 3 more weeks. What are they going to do, fire me?)

I called Dave at work, and he said that he would head out at the same time. There’s only one other road that connects to our teeny little podunk town to the rest of the world, a 2-lane state highway. We couldn’t go south and take the road north toward home because everything that way was flooded. (Aside for the locals: that town south of us would be Carnation. The road I’m referring to is 203.) So our only choice was to go to this little town north of us (Monroe), and then try to head southward. This meant that my normally 11-mile commute was going to be about 35 miles instead. Fun!

I left work around 3:15 p.m. By 7:30, we’d officially given up. The town north of us had been flooded out too, so we were stuck. We found a highway patrolman, and he confirmed that there was absolutely no way into or out of Duvall that night. Great.

We went back to Dave’s office and started calling hotels. (Incidentally, four hours in a car only to end up back where you started? I almost burst into tears on several occasions.) All of the hotels were booked because a whole lot of other people were in the exact same situation as us. We finally found a room, and I grabbed a t-shirt from Dave’s office, because I can’t stand to sleep topless and my little frilly maternity shirt wasn’t going to cut it. (Good thing about Dave’s company, you can usually find some kind of promotional t-shirt lying around.)

I called one of our neighbors, who happened to be stranded in Duvall rather than outside of it like us, and since she has a key to our house, she said she’d go check on the kitties for us. I love her. Seriously, I’m going to have to bake something for her.

Then I called my friend Janet, who’s also pregnant (I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that here before because I was trying to protect her privacy during her first trimester, but she’s over 20 weeks now, so I think I can safely say it – they’re having a girl too, so yay!). She and her husband live right near Dave’s office, so I asked if I could steal a prenatal vitamin, because I didn’t want to go buy a whole new bottle. She was like, “Um, yes of course, but you do realize that you can skip it for one night and it won’t do any harm, right?” I don’t know why I panicked about it, she’s totally right. It’s not like the vitamins are probably even doing all that much at this stage in the game, it was probably way more important in the beginning, but whatever.

The hotel turned out to be really nice. (Another aside for the locals: the Clarion Inn in Kirkland. It rocked. Send all of your out-of-town guests there.) The Indian ladies who ran the place were fantastic – maybe they felt all maternal toward me because I’m pregnant, I don’t know. But the manager lady brought me extra pillows and warm chocolate chip cookies, so I loved her.

But even though it was a nice hotel, the bed wasn’t my bed, and even with the extra pillows, I couldn’t get comfortable. (And for the record, that t-shirt I snagged from Dave’s office? It was a large and I should’ve gotten an XL, because I looked like I was in some sort of weird maternity tube dress. It was neither flattering nor comfy.)

I finally fell asleep around midnight. Dave woke up at 4:30, which woke me up too. He went back to sleep soon after that, and I tried to, but Baby Girl decided that 5 a.m. was the perfect time to start dancing an Irish jig. I have never had baby kicks keep me awake before, and yeah ok it was all sweet and cute, but at the same time – dear god, knock it off so I can sleep already! The one good thing is that Dave almost never gets to feel her kick, because as soon as I tell him to put his hand on my stomach, she stops. So he’d only felt her one time before this morning. Today he felt her about 20 times. I guess that was a good thing.

Since Dave fell asleep and I couldn’t, I turned on the local news to try to find out the latest on the roads. At 7 a.m., I heard them say that one of the roads had opened. I woke Dave up, we got our free complimentary hotel breakfast (again, love the lovely Indian ladies who know how to make a seriously kick-ass cheese omelet), and we headed out. We finally got home around 10 a.m. I took a nap for about an hour, but I still feel like absolute hell. I think I’ll be recovering from this experience for the next few days.

We headed down to take pictures of the damage at the bottom of the hill we live on. You can see them here, or click on this picture and it’ll take you to the beginning of the set.

We also made a little video of the whole thing, but the 5-minute video is something like 400 MB, so I need to figure out some kind of compression settings or something, because that just isn’t right. (Which means that Dave needs to figure it out, because that’s really his department.)