To make the trip even more challenging, I also decided to take both Anna and Lizzie with me. Seth had to work, and since they are no longer in day care they could either come with me or stay with my mom. I think their grandma would have loved to have them, but for some reason I felt compelled to bring both of them with me. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, or I was looking for a new challenge. Eight hours of straight driving, plus probably one and a half hours of stopping for food and potty breaks makes for one long trip with a two year old, a five year old, and only one adult. Was I insane? Possibly. But Lizzie had done exceptionally well on a weekend trip to PA a month or so ago. Maybe this could work.
So at 7:30am on a Wednesday morning, the van packed with snacks, drinks, a new My Little Pony for each girl, the portable DVD player, the GPS, and our suitcase, we set off on our adventure. Other than a moment of panic when I thought the girls were going to demand to stop once an hour, the trip up was great. The girls played with their toys, watched one movie before lunch and one after, marveled at large trucks and a wind farm, and looked for shapes in the clouds. We got to our hotel before 6pm, then went over to Kristin and Jeff's for a yummy dinner and some fun.
I have to say, the girls behaved exceptionally well while we were in Ohio. They were polite, they played well with other kids, they ate the food put in front of them, and I didn't hear a lot of whining. However, while the kids were perfect, our presence was apparently a curse on the Bartholomew household. It's not like the bad stuff wouldn't have happened if we weren't there, but while we were there it seemed to happen all at once. First, their air conditioning went on the fritz during a record-breaking heatwave. The kitchen fan broke. Their awesome new stroller lost a washer off the front wheel and was unusable for our trip to the science center. When leaving the science center, they got caught in terrible traffic with two unhappy boys and a screaming baby (we drove separately, and the GPS apparently has traffic avoidance, which I did not realize, and it magically got us back to their house long before they made it back). And throughout Thursday and Friday while we were there, HVAC techs were in and out of the house multiple times a day, saying they were fixing the air conditioning but never quite seeming to get it resolved.
Even with all of that, everyone still seemed to have a good time! The kids got along really well, and we did all sorts of fun things. Baby Katie is adorable, of course, and much time was spent admiring her cuteness. Our last night there, the girls got free t-shirts from a local ice cream shop, which totally made their day. It was a really good trip, and it actually got me thinking that maybe I could do this sort of thing with the girls more often.
At least I thought that until the day we left. We ate breakfast at our hotel Saturday morning, then attempted to get on the road. You know how I hadn't really heard any whining from the girls for the last three days? They'd been saving it all up. Even with movies and new toys purchased as souvenirs from Ohio, the trip back tested my sanity. Our wonderful GPS wanted us to avoid DC on the way back home, so it sent us down 81, down 17, over to Fredericksburg, and then back to 95. Which is fine, except Anna was going crazy because she didn't remember making that many turns on the way up to Ohio, so she felt it was her duty to tell me as often as possible that I was probably going the wrong way.
We pulled into our driveway around 6:15, home safely, but in foul moods. Anna is still working on getting all of the whining out of her system that she saved up in Ohio, and Lizzie's sleep schedule is still off. The day we came home, I swore I would never do a trip like that again without another adult. But having a day or so to process it, the trip home wasn't too bad. We were all just anxious to actually get home. Give me a few more days, and I'll probably forget about the trip home altogether and be ready to plan another road trip! Except this time, we'll try not to take the Goodman Curse along with us so that whoever we visit will want us to come back again :)
