(Long) Road Trips

When I was younger I remember taking long road trips to Colorado. There was something fun about being brought out of bed at 4:00am, getting in the car with my pillow and blanket while it was still dark out, and going back to bed for a few hours before a breakfast stop. I can remember enjoying so much car time to do things I enjoyed doing - listening to music, reading, and sprawling out on top of my sisters and sleeping for many, many hours.

Because David's family lives in Washington and mine lives in Iowa, added to the fact that we worked for 2 years in California, we have taken many cross-country road trips together as well. While I can't say that we love long road trips, we've never really minded them. We enjoy the long hours to talk and listen to music, and we each have books or projects to work on in the car. And who doesn't enjoy a few extra hours of sleep?

This was all before kids.

Thursday night began our long road trip from Oklahoma to Washington, with our only stops in Phoenix and Boise. We decided to do as much night driving as we could to take advantage of the kids sleeping, and left at midnight on Thursday night to begin our trip.

Thursday night/Friday all day was a very long day. We drove over 1,000 miles for a marathon day from Oklahoma to Phoenix, AZ, and arrived in the evening to visit David's college buddy Chad. We stayed with him all day Saturday, enjoying time in the pool in the 100+ degree weather, and then took off Saturday night around midnight for round 2. Our second marathon driving of almost another 1,000 miles took us from Phoenix to just outside of Boise, ID. We stayed with our friends the Cossel Family, and enjoyed their trampoline and a house full of dogs. Monday was an easy day - only 7 hours from Boise to Spokane, WA, with a stop along the way to see David's grandpa and 2 aunts.

While we took advantage of night driving so our kids could sleep, we still had plenty of awake hours when they needed entertainment to save them from the boring car ride. Both kids are troopers - considering the 40+ hours we were in the car, they did their fair share of sleeping, and Adele watched countless hours of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. There were only moments of time that one or both were crying.

Still, having two kids in the back to constantly be thinking about and taking care of sure changes my perspective on long road trips!

Adele highlights of the trip include:

-Talking non-stop in the car for an hour at night because she was so excited about the road trip.

-Coming upon a city with a lot of lights at night and her saying "Yook at all the Christmas trees Mommy!"

-Waving to the man in a cowboy hat in a truck next to us saying "It's a cowboy!"

-Narrating "It's a blue truck! It's a red car! It's a white truck!" as we drive along the highway passing cars around us.

-Seeing frogs jumping on the grass at the Cossel house and John Cossel asking Adele if she can catch one. She responds "All right" and goes and picks one up.

-Me telling someone how Henry likes to cat-nap and Adele chiming in saying "yeah he says meeeoow".

-Adele being so relieved/overcome with emotion to finally reaching Spokane that she buried her head in my shoulder and shed a few tears before getting down and giving big hugs to everyone.

Would we do a road trip again this way with marathon days of driving? I'm not sure yet. Too soon to tell. Two things I know for sure:

1) We're glad we're here.
2) We're tired. :)