On The Road Again

19 hours, 45 minutes, 6 seconds, door to door. It might have been our fastest time yet. A logical person would wonder how many miles we covered in that time. I say that it doesn't matter. The distance is always the same, only our efficiency in travel is variable.

Shhhhh.......

We used to fly from Texas to Michigan for Christmas. Then we went and had too many kids. If we were to fly now it might just be cheaper to buy the whole plane. Six plane tickets is a LOT. Then you have car rental, and since we can't fit in a normal car we have to rent a van which costs about 10 times more than a car. Again, for the two weeks we're up there, we might as well just pop by the dealer and buy something. I think I know why big families never go anywhere farther than they can stand to drive.
We've settled into a pretty efficient driving routine. We leave after lunch on day one. We stop for dinner and the kids go to sleep near their normal bed time of 8:00. We drive through the night alternating between driving and sleeping for my wife. I can stay up late into the night pretty well as long as I'm fueled with gummi bears and caffeine. My wife can sleep at the drop of a hat. She's also still functions well on just 3 or 4 hours of sleep from her breast feeding days so when I get tired she pops right up and is ready to go. The kids wake up between 5:00 and 6:00 and soon after we give them breakfast in the car. We make it to our destination before lunch. This schedule maximizes the time that people are sleeping in the car and minimizes the time needed for meal and bathroom stops. Sleeping children neither eat or pee which is a real advantage.
Our kids really are great car riders. They read a lot and color and just seem to be able to take being strapped in place for that long. I suspect that if anyone is ever looking for astronauts to Mars my kids will put our car trips down on their applications. There's a lot of 'are we there yet' from the little ones who seem to have a bit of trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that we won't be there until tomorrow. Even the dog seems to have made peace with the idea that we occasionally live in a car instead of a house.
Being a stay at home dad gives me a little more say in the whole road trip experience. Not only do I get to use my real life Tetris skills to pack the truck, I also get to interpret my kids demands. Are they hungry? Nope, they're just fine. Do they really need to pee or can they make it to the next rest stop in 22 miles? They can make it. I'm home with them all the time, I just know these things, I'm finely in tune to my children. Except when I'm not. Last year our youngest was only potty trained by a few months and that had me a little nervous. He was great at making it to the toilet, but he wasn't so good at knowing when that would happen. When he said he had to go poop 10 minutes after a rest stop when we had asked him if he needed to poop, I confidently declared that he really didn't have to go. He was just thinking about the last rest stop and it was all in his head. He did this in the grocery store all the time when we walked by the bathroom. He'd be fine when he forgot about it. Except at it turns out he couldn't forget about it. In fact, 5 minutes later nobody could forget about it, ever. We had planned for accidents with a change of clothes right next to the door so we were sort of prepared. I took him waddling awkwardly into the next truck stop bathroom. I got him up on the changing table and it was clear that his underwear was a complete loss. I was like an insurance adjuster looking over a terrible wreck, clearly they were totaled, no one could dispute this claim. I still fee bad for all of the people that used that restroom until the trash was changed. You can't just flush underwear, and garbage cans just don't have lids tight enough to contain the fact that something terribly wrong has happened. Truck stop bathrooms are sometimes pretty horrible places, but that bathroom, on that day, was it's own special kind of horrible for all that visited after us.
Thankfully this year was uneventful, some scars heal slowly.