Moving Vehicles

A few highlights from our three day trip from Maryland to North Dakota:

Despite spending two nights in hotels with beautiful swimming pools, this was the closest we got to the hotel swimming pool.

We spent the first night just inside the Indiana border.  

There was no room for us in the breakfast room at the first hotel, so we ate our breakfast at the coffee table in the lobby.  We had muffins.  That was a mistake.  I picked up as many of the crumbs as I could, but I'm afraid we didn't leave that spot cleaner than we found it.  We did, however, with six eaters, get our money's worth at the continental breakfast.

Our cat, Moria, made the trip.

Can you find her?

It's possible that we could have crammed more things in the van, we just would have had to glue them to the ceiling.  We had so much stuff inside the van that when we stopped somewhere and needed to get the kids out, we had to move no less than five things to the passenger seat to get to the kids.  We also had a luggage carrier stuffed full attached to the back of the van.

It's not so different from when we moved to Maryland four years ago.

  

When getting Xandra out of this packed car, we had to bring her out between the two front seats because we had both sides next to her carseat packed nearly to the ceiling.

We were expecting a pretty rough trip with four young kids and many, many hours in the car.  The truth is that the kids did very well on the trip.  There was a minimum of crying and whining and they were generally happy to just color, read books, and play together.  Joe and I even enjoyed it as it was much nicer than all the crazy activity of the days just before travelling.  It was refreshing in an odd sort of way.

We stayed in Wisconsin on our second night.  It was really cold out   The cold killed almost all of a special plant we were trying to transport to North Dakota.  The jury is still out if the plant will make it.

When we got to the hotel room, I was having steady, painful contractions.  I crawled into bed and hoped they would stop.  They did.

We arrived in North Dakota on Monday, February 27th at around 3:00PM, 48 hours after we left Maryland, with four kids, a cat, a pregnant lady still pregnant, a car load of stuff to unpack, and a strong desire to stay out of moving vehicles for awhile.