The last week of March we went to visit Brian's family in Knoxville, Tennessee. It is over 850 miles away, about 14 hours of driving time. We decided on the way down to split the driving into two days, one of 10 hours and one of 4 hours. Brian looked at a map and thought we should go to the other side of Roanoke, VA to stop. Well the map was zoomed out more than he thought and where we stopped ended up being another hour of driving. It was around 9:00 before we got to the hotel (bedtime for our kids is 7:30). Fortunately the kids were still being good, I reminded Brian to get a roll away bed, since the kids won't sleep in the same bed. He came back and said the roll away costs $10, so we would just sleep with the kids.
Well Brian slept with Minna and I slept by Joshua. I use the term sleep loosely. The kids slept real sound for a while, then in the middle of the night they started stirring. Minna started hogging the entire queen size bed, cornered Brian against the side of the bed and then started kicking him. Joshua started crawling around the bed like a bulldozer, randomly yelling. They were both totally asleep the whole time. After that night Brian said to kick him if he ever did not get a roll away bed again.
We had planned on going to church but after that bad night we couldn't get going fast enough to make it. So we just went on.
When we do road trips right now we put Joshua and Minna in the back to watch movies and Minna sometimes does stickers when she gets bored. One of the adults drives obviously, and the other sits in the middle with Miriam, to give her toys, and to change out the kids movies, divvy up food, ect... I started out driving from NY. The night before it had snowed and it takes an hour to get to the interstate we take to TN, so we were on back roads for a while. There were random snow drifts in the middle of the road, and once we got out of those it started snowing. We were headed south though, so away from the snow. The second day we were in Southern Virginia and we woke up to more snow, but we were headed south again, surely we would get away. The next day we went even further south to Chattanooga to visit some friends, and it was snowing again. We couldn't get rid of it.
On the way home we decided to go in one day after the hotel disaster on the way to Tennessee. Brian and I both woke up at 3:00 spontaneously and since our alarms were set for 4:00 we just decided to get up. The kids can sleep through anything when they are out. Brian loaded up the car and took their beds apart and they didn't wake up until Brian took them out to the car. --The first morning we were home, the batteries in the fire alarm needed to be changed, and when Brian changed them, it started beeping, and the kids slept through that too.--Anyway we were on our way home by 3:40.
Twenty minutes in the the trip Miriam started throwing up. Brian got off at the first exit so we could clean her up. But it was foggy, and dark, and there were no stores there, so we couldn't see to clean her at all. So we had to drive to the next exit and finally found a gas station to clean her up. I thought she had just found and eaten too many goldfish from her car seat and maybe choked, so I didn't think too much about it. Then a few minutes later she threw up again. I was about ready to go back to Knoxville, but Brian convinced me to wait an hour to see what happened before we turned around. I agreed, mostly because I realized at that time nobody would be awake to take us back in anyway. Fortunately she stopped throwing up, and we made really good time.
Well we made really good time until dinner. We thought we would eat in this bigger town we were going through, but then the GPS bypassed around it, so we were just driving by little towns in southwestern NY. We looked for food on the GPS, and the first place it took us to was out of business, and the second place it took us to was closed that day, in fact every restaurant in town was closed. (Some how these little towns don't really have grocery stores either, I have no idea where they get food to eat). By that point the kids were crying because they were hungry, Miriam wanted to nurse and we were getting desperate. The next town said it had a Dunkin Donuts, we normally avoid fast food, but we didn't know what else to do at that point. Fortunately that town also had a diner that was open, so we went there instead. After that it was an easy 2 hours home and we had the kids in bed a little after 8:00. And they stayed there because they were so excited to have their beds.
We love our Spanish Fork Missionaries
5 months ago
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