Road trip: Day one

July 6, 2006

8:02 am We left the house. My goal was to leave by 8. Not bad. It was raining. Yuck.

8:37 am My car started acting funny. It had been raining for a while and the roads were really wet and it almost felt like the car was hydroplaning a little bit every time we hit a puddle. It was kind of freaky. My mom thought we should pull over and look at the tires. I asked her, "What are we going to look for?" She said we should check the tires. So we did. We didn't see anything obviously wrong with them, so we kept on going. It acted funny a few more times that day, but once we hit dry roads it was fine.

10 am First of many, many potty breaks on the trip. Brandon had a knack for asking to use the potty right after we had passed by a town. Thank goodness he's a boy so we could just pull over on the side of the road when we needed to.

Sometime mid-morning We passed a semi truck carrying "WHOLE CHICKENS!" Whitney was ecstatic and asked if we could drive by it again. We tried to explain in 2-year-old language that you usually only pass a car once on a road trip.

Lunch time I had gone to McDonalds.com and mapped out all of their restaurants that had playlands that were within half a mile of our route. I thought that would be a great way to let the kids run around and play regardless of the weather. We somehow missed the exit of the one I had written down on the close side of Atlanta, so we kept driving, but the kids (and me and my mom) were getting hungry, so we didn't wait until the far side of Atlanta, we just picked a random McDonalds and stopped there for lunch. Of course it didn't have a playland and it turned out to be on a BAD side of town in Atlanta. We tried to eat quickly. Whitney didn't eat much of her food, but drank her entire chocolate milk and then was just walking around inside the restaurant. I had just finished eating (one of those new Asian chicken salads. It was really yummy!) and Whitney walked up to me and threw up all over. Oh, sick! Just what we needed. One of my friends from home had just told me that her whole family was just getting over a stomach flu and even though we hadn't been hanging around with them, my first thought was, "Oh great! Whitney has a stomach bug. I'm going to have to cancel this trip to nurse her back to health." My mom said she was probably just carsick. I think she was right, because we didn't have a problem after that.

Mid-afternoon We couldn't believe it, but we drove by that semi with the WHOLE CHICKENS again! Sorry for those of you who don't know the whole chicken story. It's too long to record right now. We also drove by the Talladega Speedway. Holy cow that thing is huge! Brandon thought it was pretty awesome and wanted to stop. The dreams of becoming a NASCAR driver continue.

Evening We stopped at Tupelo, Miss, birthplace of Elvis Presley. They have a cute little park built around the house where he grew up. We were too late to go in the visitors center, but we enjoyed the fountains and all of the plaques where you could read about him. Ok, my mom was the only one who got to read any of them. I was racing Brandon around on the sidewalks and keeping Whitney from falling into any of the fountains.

Dinner Hardees was the closest place we could find to eat. It was pretty gross. Now I know why I never eat there.

9:15 pm Central time We arrived at Marianne and Patrick's house, our first destination. Marianne has been my best friend since 4th grade. It was so fun to see her apartment and the new town house where they'll be moving this month. Now I'll be able to picture where she is when we talk on the phone for hours! :) The kids had a blast with Patrick. They played hide and seek and drove remote control cars around the house. It was hard to convince them that it was time to go to bed.

Total travel time: 14 hrs 13 min
Miles travelled: 667
States passed through: NC, SC, GA, AL, MS

One of the great thing about road trips is that

you get to see random things like huge pieces

of fruit on the side of the road!

Here is my mom in Tupelo, MS

Marianne and Me

Notice I'm still smiling

The kids did great on the drive. I am SO happy about that. I burned a couple of new CDs for them before we left. One was one that I'd downloaded with songs that they like right now--from the CARS soundtrack, snow white, veggietales, etc. That was a big hit. We played 20 questions with Brandon. We just call it "Animal" in my family. I had taken all of my dollar store purchases and put them in brown paper bags with their initials on the outside for the kids. I calculated out how many I'd bought and how many hours we'd be on the road and they got to open a prize about every three hours. They looked forward to those things so much! Even though they were usually just some cheap little toy, they brought some excitement to the trip for them. And then the DVD player was a huge help! My friend, Kim, let me borrow a bunch of DVD's that my kids have never seen, so they were in heaven. Another fun thing we did today was to eat Pringles prints with jokes on them and tell each other the cheezy jokes. There were a few that really did make us laugh. Here are two of the better ones:

Why did the man go out with the raisin?

Because he could find a date!

Why did the dolphin cross the ocean?

To get to the other TIDE.

Ha ha!