Vacation - Day One

Perhaps taking a vacation the week after a major church youth trip in Texas was not the best idea. An even worse idea may have been to attend a family reunion in Stillwater yesterday. To add to this, our plans to board Slinky fell through late Friday night so Andrea had to drop four of the kids and me off at the reunion and then turn around with Caleb and take Slinky to stay with her parents in Tulsa. The reunion was to end at 6pm so we felt that we had plenty of time for her to go and return, this was until I realized that all family members were pretty much finished reuniting by 4:45 which is when I saw people began to clean up. Andrea was still over an hour away, I quickly hitched a ride for four kids and myself (not that easy of a task). I say this may not have been the best ideas for two reasons, the first being that we were totally not ready for the alarm to go off this morning at 7:00am, and then again at 7:09am, then again at 7:18am, then again at 7:27am, then again…I have to stop here due to my poor math skills. The second reason is that Slinky is living the life of luxury at my in-laws, they had a heating pad ready for him to sleep on and sat and pet him for hours his first night. I feel certain he is going to laugh at the thought of returning to our mad house where he has to share attention with “those” five kids. So, at 7:something Andrea and I finally pulled our exhausted bodies out of bed.

It was clear that our departure goal of 8:00am was not going to work since I had not even packed yet, but we shot ahead anyway. Things were going smoothly until I went out and opened up the back of my dad’s SUV which we borrowed for the trip only to discover that the luggage room had somehow disappeared. Mom and Dad coyly mentioned this to me last night as I took the car but, having never seen the car with the seats all up, I felt that it would be fine. This morning, as I stood there with a stack of suitcases I began to doubt my confidence.

As I began the harrowing process Isaiah comes out carrying his toothbrush in hand, “Do I need to bring this?”

Near completion I had to go inquire if Andrea was really serious about going on vacation with us since we could really use her seat for luggage….she said I would have to buy her an airline ticket, I looked at our bank account and quickly found room for all the luggage and her. At least I thought it was all the luggage, as four of the kids were in the car in their claimed seats, I see Grace come out of the house pulling a suitcase….Isaiah’s suitcase.

“Oh, yeah,” he said from the back, “I meant to bring that.” He then returned to his DS.

Finally we were in the car and on the road, “Wait a minute,” Isaiah shouted from the back of the car, “Do you mean we are not going to church? I thought we were going to church first.” We then attempted to explain the entire Florida vacation plan, “Oh, yeah,” he commented and then returned again to his DS.

We chose to rely on the Garmin to direct us on the trip; Gar has never failed us thus far. What we did not know was that Gar has some prejudice against the major roads in Texas; we now are intimately acquainted with the small towns of northeast Texas. Particularly Bonham, Texas which is where we stopped for lunch, we knew it was time for lunch as it was at this point that Isaiah began to torment his sister Hannah, that was a point of no return…food was the only solution, that and sitting at separate tables. Gar led us to a downtown Mexican restaurant which was very good but apparently has no concern for speed; we were now over an hour behind schedule.

Because the clean bathrooms at the Mexican restaurant were not good enough we soon had to stop for a potty break. This was possibly our biggest mistake. As we approached the outside bathrooms of the Shell Station in somewhere, Texas, the manager came running out with a light bulb.

“You will need this,” he began, “ and you won’t want to use the men’s room since it has been stopped up since this morning, darn (I am using my pastoral censorship here) teenagers, that is why we are installing an inside entrance so we can keep an eye on what goes on in those. They stuffed an entire roll of paper towels in the toilet yesterday and I am the only person in town that can do plumbing!” He then began to walk back into the store where we later discovered that he is also the corndog and ribs cook as well, “You will need to have someone stand outside the door because it does not shut all the way.” I soon saw the look of horror in Hannah and Grace’s eyes. I went in first and attempted make it suitable for a princess, paper towels on the seats and all trash put in the can. It didn’t work and they soon yelled at me to come in and help them with it…this was not completely understood by the locals who were also standing in line for what must have been the only working toilet in town.

“We will just wait,” the girls said as they left the bathroom.

The rest of the day went pretty smoothly. We are saying that a large area of east Texas smells very bad since no one admitted responsibility for the odor. The bridge over the Mississippi gave the girls quite a scare as they were not sure it was properly engineered, a fear that I do not think is a reflection on Louisiana engineers, just my girls life of doubt in…well, just about everyone and everything.

So here we are, at the Fairfield Inn in Baton Rouge getting ready to get a good night’s sleep before we head to Destin, Florida tomorrow morning.

Here I Dwell,
Rick

We are watching “Ice Road Trucker” so I think I will be ready for just about anything on the road tomorrow.