Day 1 - Albany to Couer d'Alene - 452 Miles - The Journey Begins
Jonah woke up this morning and immediately started jumping up and down saying "today's the day!" He was extremely excited, to say the least. We had breakfast, loaded up the car, and hit the road.....to soccer practice. Before we could officially get on the road, we had to attend Jonah's last session of Lil' Kickers. This was strategic - we wanted him to be a little tired before we got on the road. Soccer went well, we even exchanged numbers with the parents of another kid in the class. The possibility of making new "couple friends" seemed to be a good omen for our trip. Couple friends are extremely hard to find, but that's for another blog, and I don't want to jinx it anyways. Jonah was pretty distracted throughout the session, continually coming over and saying "I just want to go to Wisconsin." We made it through somehow, and the trip kicked off in earnest.
Jonah immediately wanted to pop in a DVD. Watching movies in the car is still pretty new to him, as we only let him watch on trips of an hour or more. He selected his newest movie, "Tom and Jerry and the Wizard of Oz." It's only 45 minutes long, so we were on to movie #2, Enchanted, before we hit Portland. Unfortunately, Jonah has learned how to skip ahead in his movies to watch his favorite parts, which cut out about half an hour of Enchanted. We only brought 10 movies for the trip, and Rachel and I nervously commented that we'd burn through all of them on the first day at this pace.
After a quick stop in The Dalles for sandwiches from the cooler, feeding Jocie, and gas, we were ready to cross our first state border. So far, so good on the trip. Jonah had taken to playing "I Spy" with Rachel while I drove. His new favorite thing to say is "I spy something beautiful," with the answer always being his baby sister. The kid is so proud of his sister it's ridiculous. We hit Kennewick, and briefly thought about feeding Jocelyn, but she was still sleeping so we decided to push it. Not more than 20 minutes later, she was screaming, and we had to pull off at a roadside produce stand in Eltopia. We felt a little bad about pulling into their parking lot and then not buying anything, so we decided to browse the foods there. They were super nice, and Jonah took full advantage of their free samples of blueberries. We finally settled on some blueberries and a cantaloupe. Of course, about this time, a lady in her late 60's pulled in and the lady working the stand remarked to her that we were "driving all the way to Wisconsin with two young children!" The elderly lady looked at us and said "I'm driving to Wisconsin too, race ya!" She went on to tell us that she lived in Wisconsin for fifty years, along with a brief history of every other place she'd lived. Seeing people from Wisconsin along the way would become a theme, but at the Eltopia fruit stand was probably the most unlikely.
Back on the road for the final leg of our first day, Jonah got his hands on the GPS. Every so often, I'd hear the GPS say "recalculating" in its female voice with the British accent. I'm not sure why, but I feel more comfortable taking directions from a Garmin with an accent from across the pond. It probably makes no sense, because an English person is probably less likely to know what the best route to Couer d'Alene is than someone from America, but whatever. Jonah's button mashing on the thing had redirected us to the local police station, which he found hilarious. He kept saying he was taking us to jail.
About half an hour from our destination, Jocelyn got hungry again. Not wanting to stop, Rachel, who was sitting in the backseat with the kids, experimented with "mobile nursing," just dropping a boob in Jocie's face while buckled in. It was uncomfortable, but effective as Jocie got enough milk to keep her content for the rest of the trip. Rachel remarked that she didn't understand why God didn't put nipples on our fingers, as it would make the whole nursing thing a heck of a lot easier, earning herself the quote of the trip award.
We made it to our first stop, our friends Josh and Jen's house, around 7:30 ish. Jen had been Jonah's daycare provider when he was first born, and their daughter Elizabeth was Jonah's first "best friend." They also have a son (Kolby) a few months older than Jocelyn. Jonah and Lizzy started playing like they'd never been apart, running around the house and playing out in the backyard while we got caught up. Lizzy was very excited to have a "sleep over" in the living room with Jonah that night, and took extra care to lay out the blankets and pillows perfectly when it was time for bed. Jonah wanted to have a "three person nap over" as he called it, including me because he's a little scared of the dark still. Rachel and Jen agreed to stay out there til the kids fell asleep, which ended up taking longer than expected. Lizzy had brought her baby doll to the sleep over, and kept explaining to Jonah that in the middle of the night he'd have to change her babies diaper, because that was the daddy's job.
Day 2 - Couer d'Alene to Bozeman - 366 Miles - Watch out for Buffalo!
Day two started with some more play time for the kids. After breakfast and showers, we took the kids down to Lake Coeur d'Alene for some splashing around in the lake. Again, the idea was to break up the driving and also to tire Jonah out before we hit the road in earnest. Of course, as we parked at the lake, there was a guy in a "Wisconsin Basketball" t-shirt that we chatted up. He had just moved to Idaho a few months ago, but was nowhere near as friendly as the little old lady at the fruit stand. The kids had a blast playing around in the lake, and Rachel and Jen hatched a plan to marry off our kids, even posing the kids for some shots for their "wedding slide show:"
Day 3 - Bozeman to Hill City - 503 miles - Jonah's Last Stand
The day got off to an auspicious start when Jonah rolled out of bed and got wedged between the bed frame and the wall at 3 am. I pried him loose and he fell back to sleep immediately, seemingly no worse for the wear. We woke up early to get some of the Rodeway Inn's continental breakfast before getting back on the road. Their breakfast consisted of a few different types of cereal, bread, and grape jelly. That was about it. Also, the Bozeman Rodeway appeared to be the official motel of Korean-Americans, as we were the only non Asian people in the hotel. As we drove off, we saw a few giant tour buses outside, which explained things a little better.
I wanted to make a quick detour to the Battle of Little Bighorn National Monument and see where this famous battle had taken place. I knew going into this that I would be the only person in the family interested in seeing this, but I hoped that at least Jonah would like seeing some mannequins of soldiers with guns. We pulled in, and immediately Jonah gets stung by a bee on his thumb. You've never seen a kid so confused and afraid. He's sobbing and panicking at every single insect he sees. He kept saying "why did you decide to come here daddy?" Good question, son. I felt bad, but this is what usually happens when I try to plan something. When Rachel plans it, everything goes off without a hitch. When I plan something, chaos ensues. We stayed long enough for Rachel to feed Jocelyn and for me to take three pictures of Custer's death site and then we were back on the road, $10 well spent. Jonah had his thumb up like a hitchhiker for the rest of the day.
Our bad luck continued as we made our way through the northeast corner of Wyoming and into South Dakota. We planned on quick tours of the towns of Deadwood and Sturgis, but Jocie cried all the way through Deadwood, and Jonah slept through Sturgis, so those we never even go out of the car.
Our luck started to change when we hit Rapid City around 4:30 in the afternoon. We stopped at Dinosaur Park, which is probably one of the hokiest roadside attractions I've ever seen. Jonah loved it though, and we had to get pictures with every single dinosaur. We tried to have a lady take our picture, but we learned that when you have an SLR camera, you have to be selective of who you choose to take your picture:
Sorry Jocie, I guess you don't get to be in this family photo
Jonah also got some gummi dinosaurs as a snack, which fired him right up. He forgot all about his bee sting and was talking a mile a minute as we got back in the car for an early evening trip to Mount Rushmore, or "Mountain Rush" as Jonah kept calling it. Mount Rushmore, was pretty impressive, and had the kids been older and we had more time, I would've loved to have hiked around a bit and got a little closer to marvel at the level of detail that went into this project. I can't help but feel like after they did Washington's face, they thought it was too much work and kind of skimped on the other three. Lincoln's cheek basically blends into the mountain. Of course, the car parked next to us had Wisconsin plates. As we took pictures, a lady offered to take a picture of the four of us, that turned out only mildly better than the failed Dinosaur Park family portrait:
It was now around 6:30, and we'd been on the road for about 10 hours. Tired and hungry, we made our way to our hotel in Hill City. Hill City is a tiny town that I think exists solely to house Mount Rushmore tourists. We grabbed food at the only eating place we could find in the town - Dairy Queen - and pulled into the Comfort Inn for the night. Again, the car we parked next to had Wisconsin plates. Jonah got to go swimming again, in a much larger, colder pool than the night before. The gummi dino's from a few hours earlier had still not worn off, as Jonah's "swimming" turned into him showing me how every superhero he could think of would jump into a pool. It was quite entertaining for the one old guy hanging out in the hot tub. We all slept well that night as we prepared for our longest leg of the trip the next day.
Day 4 - Hill City to Richland Center - 733 Miles - Finally!
Our plan to gradually increase the length of the driving each day had paid off thus far, but with a twelve hour drive ahead of us with no planned stops, we knew it was going to be a trying day. Things got off to a good start as we had the car packed and gassed up before 6:30. The Hill City Comfort Inn had one of the best continental breakfast I've ever had, with waffles, biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs that didn't suck, sausage and fresh fruit. I made sure to tell them as we checked out that they were doing things right with that breakfast. We were on the road by 7, and predicted that we'd show up at Rachel's parents house at 8:30 that evening.
Our trip started off a bit rough, when our GPS decided to take us the most convoluted way ever back to I-90 in Rapid City. We ended up on a street that was little more than an alley, and ended at a daycare facility on a cul de sac. It took us nearly an hour just to get back to the highway. Fortunately, traffic was light and the road construction was minimal, and we were able to make up some serious time on I-90. Jonah watched a few movies, kept asking when we'd be there, and disagreed with the suggestion we stop for food because it would delay our arrival at Grandma and Papa's. We broke out a few things we'd been holding back to entertain him, including a Scooby Doo Sticker Treasury and his Leapster Explorer, which had a cool photo scavenger hunt he could do where he took pictures of something that started with every letter of the alphabet. Rachel offered to drive the last leg, but as it had started raining and was getting dark, I felt bad making her drive in the most difficult conditions again. A quick stop at Culver's for dinner while Jonah slept in the car, and we pulled into Rachel's parents house at 8:35, five minutes after our predicted arrival. In total, we logged 2,068 miles on the way out there, averaging 23.1 MPG - pretty good for our seven passenger Journey. The car was in serious need of a wash, but the inside had stayed pretty darn clean. Rachel and I high fived on our successful mission accomplished.
The we realized we still had to drive back next weekend.
To be continued.......
No comments:
Post a Comment