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I’ve travelled with children a number of times. There’s no easy way to do it, and more importantly, no easy age. When they’re infants, you can usually time activities and road time around naps, but you still have to stop frequently to feed and diaper them; when flying, you may find yourself changing a particularly disgusting diaper while actually holding the child in your lap and the poor fellow next to you in a cheap business suit is praying he doesn’t get peed upon. As they get older, they can fend for themselves a bit more, but they still have small bladders and unreliable tempers, so you still deal with stopping every 2 hours or trying to bribe them to stop kicking the seat of the guy in front of them who may or may not have just drunk 3 tiny bottles of Absolut and taken a Xanax and is still white-knuckling the armrests, poor devil.

This is why when I looked at prices to fly 5 people to Texas this summer, and realized it was going to cost $2000 just getting to the city at which we would then have to spend another $1500 to rent a minivan to haul us around, I said “let’s just road trip this beotch.” (That is a direct quote.) One of the driving forces behind our recent automotive purchase was making sure we had a nice set of fly wheels that could get us to Texas and back (instead of taking my 1998 Dodge Caravan with broken air conditioning). Everyone said we were crazy, but I knew if we had a nice roof storage tub and a fresh change of oil, we could easily knock out a 4,000 mile round trip road cruise with no problems, because my children are well-behaved, mild-tempered, and all-around great kids who would never dream of hitting each other with pillows in the backseat when they were supposed to be napping and if you kids don’t settle down I’m going to stop the car and beat you with an empty Pringles can, now stop antagonizing each other and watch the damn video!

The Friday before we left, we got a babysitter to come over and entertain the kids while we packed, organized, repacked, cursed a lot, and eventually opened a bottle of wine. In hindsight, we should have gotten her to come back Saturday morning, because all efforts to actually get the car fully loaded were interrupted every 3 minutes by one child or another demanding food or attention.

“Mom, where’s my baseball cap?”

“In the car, packed.”

“Can I have it, please?”

“No, you can’t have it, it’s packed!”

“Why not?”

“BECAUSE WE’RE TRYING TO LEAVE PLEASE STOP BOTHERING ME.”

2 minutes later:
“Mommy, can I have a snack?”

“Did you finish your apple?”

“No.”

“Well, where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“THE APPLE.”

“I don’t know.”

“GO FIND IT.”

2 minutes later:

“Mom, Josephine has apple in her hair!”

“OMG STOP TALKING TO ME.”

As the morning wore on, it seemed less and less likely that we’d make it to our first hotel reservation (Bristol, Virginia, about 480 miles). Finally, at around 9:30, we headed out of the driveway as I muttered “Next time we’re fricking flying.” That’s right, America, I’d gotten surly and regretful not even 15 seconds into a 3-day road trip.

I wanted to get away from the I-95 corridor as quickly as I possibly could, so we skirted around Baltimore on I-695 and picked up I-70 towards Frederick, where we stopped and had a very fine picnic lunch. I’d like to go back someday; it’s a neat little small town, fairly hilly, lots of brick buildings. We didn’t spend much time on the main street but it seemed like it had a number of fun little shops and restaurants. Awfully nice place to spend a weekend at a B&B, I bet. But, we had promises to keep and miles to go before we’d sleep, so we continued west towards Harpers Ferry, where I thought we could kill a little time looking at Civil War history and stretching our legs, and add another state to the list of ones we visited on the trip. That’s when we hit Traffic, with a capital T. Not just “volume,” or “a mild slowdown,” but absolute dead stop. After waiting a few minutes and going no more than 15 feet, I took advantage of an emergency vehicle turnaround and headed back whence we’d come. Found a tiny road heading south, and did some meandering, eventually cutting back over to I-81 for the real haul of the trip. (We never did get into West Virginia. Oh, well.)

I-81 is a long-ass highway; 823 miles from Tennessee to Canada, and more than a third of that is in Virginia. Storms the previous day had knocked out power for much of it, making pee breaks complicated: gas stations were mostly closed, so we peed by the side of the road more than once. Shortly after we got onto I-81, at Natural Bridge, Virginia, we happened upon this amusing sight:

We hit another big traffic jam shortly after that, because someone had rolled an SUV into the ditch in the median. As we drove by, paramedics were working on some poor soul lying flat on the road nearby. Shortly after that we had to get gas, and lucked into a station that still had power. I filled it up and asked any of the kids if they had to pee, and they did not, so of course we had to stop not even 10 miles later for Charles to pee by the side of the road again. The late afternoon travel was difficult (it always was, we found as time wore on); William was very tired and irritable, and he’d drift off to sleep for a few minutes only to have Charles poke or pinch Josephine, who would scream a the top of her lungs and wake everybody up. After a few iterations of this, William simply took to crying and screaming as loudly as he could, and we had to stop to change him and get him calmed down.

We finally reached Bristol at about dinner time, and we got Chick-Fil-A (this was just prior to the whole Dan Cathy gay marriage uproar, although honestly I still felt guilty about it later because Chick-Fil-A is so delicious) and lounged by the pool for a while. We got to sleep around 10pm, but then William awoke around 11:30 and simply would not be calmed. I had to actually go and drive him around a little to get him back to sleep.

Our plan had been to try and get to the hotel as quickly as possible, stopping only as necessary along the way, but that made everyone pretty much miserable for the duration of the ride, and the extra time spent at the hotel wasn’t particularly fun either. We decided that the next day’s travel would start earlier and end later, but feature lots of long breaks. To that end, we got up around 6:30, got our free continental breakfast and some cheap coffee, and got on the road around 8:30, passing into Tennessee. By 10am, everyone in the car had to pee, so we pulled off at Gatlinburg and spent some time exploring a little visitors center. Sarah had snagged some Krispy Kreme when we got gas on the way out of Bristol, so we enjoyed those on the visitor center’s front porch, and had Charles and Josephine race each other from one end of the porch to the other. I liked the look of Gatlinburg, and really thought it might be nice to drive up into the mountains a bit and look for bears, but we didn’t really have time. I promised myself we’d try and do it on the way back, but of course we were even more rushed then and had to skip it.

Our next destination was Chattanooga. I had done a little googlin’ and discovered they had a nifty railroad museum, and knowing Josephine’s love of all things trainular we planned to get there around lunchtime and wander a bit. We didn’t announce ahead of time where we were going, so once we got there Josephine flipped out (“TRAINS! TRAINS! WHERE’S THOMAS?”). She was actually a little frightened to see exactly how big the engines and rolling stock were, and didn’t want to get very close to the enormous black steam locomotive you can see in the gallery below. She did climb up into some of the passenger cars, though. They had a functioning train on a short loop line, but we didn’t think that was the most effective use of our time, so we just went into the museum to look at a few things. Josephine, of course, was most intrigued by a pamphlet advertising Thomas the Tank Engine, who would be visiting later in the year. We managed to drag her away from there to get an awfully expensive lunch and glance through the gift shop, and then we waved goodbye to the trains and got back on the road.

After a short time we entered Alabama, the first state on our trip that I’d never been through before. My original hope was that we’d get as far as Tuscaloosa, where’d we stop for the night before pushing on towards New Orleans the next day. We realized that a detour to New Orleans would pretty much add an entire 4th day to our travels, so we decided against that, but still managed to reach Tuscaloosa fairly early in the evening because of the time change entering Alabama. We stopped at a Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner, and decided we’d head on towards Meridian, Mississippi, where we once again spent the night at a La Quinta (reward points, y’all!).

The next day we arose early but found that the breakfast was very picked-over and still full of travellers, so we hit up a McD’s on the way out of town and headed west. We stopped in Vicksburg, on the Mississippi River, where we played a bit at a small park and took pictures of neat things at the waterfront (including a big flood levee with marks on it indicating where recent floods had crested). We continued west, but only got to Monroe, Louisiana, before William got antsy, so we stopped in another McDonalds to get a hearty lunch. After that we continued to Shreveport, where we made a gas and potty stop, and Sarah nearly murdered everyone in the gas station because they had no changing tables in either bathroom and she had to change William next to the sink. I have a motto: if a place is so backward that they don’t have a changing table in the men’s room, I do it out in the middle of the establishment in view of as many people as possible, the message being, “Hey, if you don’t like seeing baby dicks, then maybe splurge the few hundo and get a fold-out changing table in the bathroom, idiots.” I keep hoping that a restaurant manager will say something to me about it, but in 6+ years of changing diapers everybody’s pretty much kept mum. Perhaps they know I’ll fling a diaper at them.

Eventually we got into Texas, to the great glee of the younger passengers, who of course didn’t understand why weren’t at Grandma and Grandpa’s yet. (Josephine developed the amusing habit of constantly saying “This is TEXAS?” for nearly two weeks; she couldn’t imagine how we could leave a place, drive for 2-3 hours, reach another place, and not have left the state. That’s a born and raised Delawarean, right there.) I myself experienced great glee when I realized that even the small two-lane roads (I deliberately avoided the interstates because they suck) had 70mph speed limits, aside from the occasional small town. A fully-loaded Mazda CX-9 can still pass slower traffic very effectively, it turns out. Around dinner time, we found ourselves in Crockett, Texas, where we stopped in at a “Whataburger” and had a pretty solid meal and some fine southern hospitality. The hotel options in town consisted of 3-4 really shady trucker motels, and a Holiday Inn Express, which had no vacancy. I don’t know what attracted people to Crockett, TX, on a Sunday in early July, but it apparently was a popular town that weekend. After a few calls I determined that another hotel in Centerville, about an hour west, had space. We went to a Sonic to use their playground and got two cups of truly horrible “coffee” (it was so bad that Sarah actually refused to drink hers…more for me!), and then continued on our way.

We reached Centerville at about 9pm, by which time all the kids were asleep. I pointed out that we were only 2.5-3 hours from Mason; why go to the trouble and expense of staying the night in a hotel when we could just push on while everyone slept and get to our destination around midnight? Sarah agreed, with reservations, so we continued. William, of course, spent the next 90 minutes alternately sleeping and screaming. I stopped on the side of the road near Eddy to pee, and then found myself on I-35 heading south with 75mph speed limits and enough caffeine in my system to give a horse a coronary. I felt like I was steering an X-wing down a canyon on the first Death Star. I’m pretty sure some of the cars behind me were shooting lasers, but I managed to dodge them and keep rolling. Just north of Austin, I continued west, but had to lessen my speed a bit because I kept seeing (or hallucinating) deer on the side of the road. We reached Mason at 11:57pm, at which point of course everyone woke back up and we didn’t get to sleep until after 2am.

William was up early the next morning, which awoke Charles and Sarah; I got up shortly thereafter in time to see Grandpa’s brother, Uncle Fred, come by with Aunt Joan and a whole crew of cousins and dogs and four-wheelers and pickup trucks. Charles hopped on the back of a four-wheeler with his cousin Jacob, and headed off to fish. Josephine slept in for quite some time, which was a blessing to all. Sarah and her mom went into Mason to do Zumba; they returned at the same time as the fishing crew, and I went off with all of them to admire a very large tree that somehow I managed to get no pictures of at all. We had lunch, and then Sarah and her mom went grocery shopping in town. After that we went to Fred and Joan’s to use their lovely swimming pool and eat their watermelon, and then came back to Grandpa’s house for spaghetti dinner and bed.

On Wednesday we started the day with pancakes and sausage (my plan to stick to my Intermittent Fasting diet had been pretty much discarded on day 2 of our trip), and then Charles and I went to do some fishing with a rod and reel that Uncle Fred left for us. The only bait we had on hand were small frogs jumping around by the pond; Uncle Fred caught them by hitting them with his hat, so I did the same, which left annoying mud stains on my bright red Phillies cap. Once stunned, a small frog will not resist much as you stick a hook through it. Oddly, I was not grossed out by this. Charles’s casting skills left much to be desired; within a few minutes he’d managed to catch the hook in my pinky, which didn’t do much damage but which did break the line. I, because I’m an idiot, compounded the problem by trying to pry the lead weight off the broken line with a pocket knife and slicing my left forefinger open at the top. I went back up to get a band-aid and was handed a small mason jar of live katydids by my father-in-law, who advised us to use them as bait, and here I have to admit: I was too much of a wuss. They’re just big grasshoppers, but I couldn’t tell if the big thing on the back was a stinger, or how you could manage to grab just one out of the jar without the rest getting away, so I stuck to frogs, which might pee on you but which didn’t normally bite or sting. We caught no fish.

In the late morning we took the kids back to Fred and Joan’s for a swim, and then went back home for lunch and naps. I was able to go out with the .22LR rifle that Grandpa’d given me for my birthday last winter and demonstrate my excellent sharpshooting skeelz (see evidence below). In the evening, we went to Grandpa’s cousin Joan’s house (a different Joan than his sister-in-law, obviously, but I thought I’d make sure you weren’t confused), where she and her husband Richard had put together a fantastic barbecue meal. Richard takes his BBQ seriously; he has a few of his own smokers, and when he and Joan shoot deer in the fall he makes some of the venison into fantastic smoked sausage, which I ate entirely too much of. They also had nice brisket, and some potato salad, and some of the best dill pickles I’ve ever had. After dinner we enjoyed looking at the stars, and the kids ran around and played with glow sticks.

Next time (hopefully not 3 weeks hence): we visit forts and bat caves, and head to Waco to look for bears and dinosaur tracks.