The new year is upon us, and we finished off our old year and started up this new one in San Diego. We left a week ago, on Sunday, two days after Christmas, with a mad plan to get up really early and make the drive in one day.

For background, last June when we left San Diego (yes, you counted correctly, that’s two SoCal trips in the same year), we left about 7:30 in the morning and managed to get home about 10pm that night—roughly 14.5 hours is the number that sticks in our head.

This time, traveling south—we rolled out at 6:10am and arrived right around 11pm—it took roughly 17 hours. Two things worked against us: snowy roads on southern Highway 97 in Oregon and all the holiday traffic returning to Southern California the same day.

It was grueling.

We spent New Year’s Eve at my brother’s house, playing Balderdash and Left 4 Dead 2 and drinking beers and ringing in the New Year. We had tired kids, so we retired to our hotel just after midnight.

So far my 2010 has consisted of seeing Up in the Air (my brother and sister-in-law watched the kids for us), drinking more beer, and driving home. We left San Diego around 9am yesterday and made it to Redding around 8pm last night—we wisely decided to split the drive home into two days.

The 11-hour drive to Redding isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds; we made really good time most of the way—through Los Angeles especially!—and we stopped for maybe an hour at the Olive Pit in Corning for dinner and, well, to shop for olives.

We made it the rest of the way home by mid-afternoon today, and I’m pleased to report none of the snow and ice we encountered a week ago is there. The roads were perfectly clear and except for some weird inversion-layer fog we hit just out of Weed—and up through Klamath Falls—driving conditions were great.

So, in a nutshell, that’s how my 2010 is going so far. How’s yours?