Road Trip! Utah to Arizona

We have started the road trip. Me versus five kids, heaven help us all. Let's start with my favorite exchange of the day:

Bonnie, said in her most grumpy teenage voice: “Why do you want to see the Grand Canyon? It’s just a hole in the ground.”

Later…

Bonnie, now annoyed: “Why can’t I see the Grand Canyon? You just said we’re getting close!”

Me: “Because…it’s just a hole in the ground.”

Bonnie: “Oh.”

The hole in the ground.

So here's how the trip is progressing. Some things are working well, some not so much.

What worked well:

• The candy jar. Every hour, each kid gets a small candy (mostly Starbursts) for being good in the car and being nice to their family. The latter requirement is the one that’s been difficult for them.
• Daily “treats”. Each day, they get something new.  So far, they’ve gotten new backpacks, a folder with activity pages (license plate games, etc) that my sister put together) and a white board, complete with erasable marker. Collin keeps insisting that he needs all his “treats” at once, but I’m holding out.
• Activity List: My dashboard has a list of activities we can do. When we are bored, we look at it and do something new. My list: cleaning time, coloring time, activity page time, stretching time, game time (alphabet game, etc.), free time, music time, movie time, book on CD time.
• Rotations: We split the day into three parts (for the three children that are old enough to ride in the front seat). Then we rotate – everyone has a turn in the front, middle and back. Except Sophia, who sits in the back and just has rotating companions.  
• Stopping at parks: Each day, we’ve stopped at a park. Afterwards, the kids are so much more relaxed in the car. I was raised to get where we’re going, not to stop and enjoy the ride. The kids are even programmed this way: they ask me at least once a day if we can just “get where we’re going”. Truly, we’re all so much happier after stopping – even if it’s just for 15 minutes.

What hasn’t worked: Jack sitting next to Sophia. ‘Nuf said.

Where we’ve been:

• Territorial Statehouse Museum: The kids were too squirrely to go inside, so we just took pictures outside of the pioneer cabins and schoolhouse. Not that impressed, although I probably would have been more impressed if we actually went inside.

• East Canyon Park, Cedar City, UT: Loved it – the kids played in the river.
• Cousins’ House: The fam put together a delicious dinner for us (yay!) and gave us a stress-free place to crash. They even have kids’ toys in the basement.
• Fredonia Park: The equipment was metal. It was hot. The kids were not impressed. They did get out of the car, though.

• Grand Canyon: Amazingly enough, it wasn’t too hot. The parking lots were almost empty. We went, we saw, we bought souvenirs. Kids were impressed, and so was I – even though it was “just a hole in the ground”.

• Bow and Arrow Park, Flagstaff, AZ: A small and not-too-impressive park, it still kept the kids very happy for a while, and let them get out some steam. Not so much Bonnie, however, who said “Can we leave yet? How about now” about a hundred times.

• Walnut Canyon National Monument: Whoa. Cliff dwellers were impressive - making a home on the side of a cliff, as well as farming there? Amazing. Sadly, Sophie pooped out on this one, so we didn't stay very long. Very, very sleepy girl.

Although she is faking sleeping in this picture.

All in all, really enjoying myself. And tomorrow we start driving with the caravan! Then I’ll have adult help and we’ll hopefully have even more fun.

Planning for Vacation

Family vacation this summer is going to be a doozy. First off, Doug is not coming, so I'm on my own with the kiddos. Then, this is a car trip spanning the entire United States. Maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but not much.

To make it fun, I am doing some serious planning. That is where most of my free time has gone in the past five months.

Planning a Route & Activities:
The first, most important step. I don't want to think about where we are going when I've been in the car with children all day and my brain is fried. Since we're going to be in the car anyway, we decided to take a slightly longer route to include some places we've never seen. Like the Alamo and New Orleans (woot!).

Next I started looking for things to do along the way. My thought is that having a place to stop every two hours or so gives us something to do and keeps the driver(s) awake. It also allows us to experience the areas we're going through, instead of just experiencing yet another freeway/highway/gas station.

My favorite site for this is aaa.com. If you're not a member, it won't do much. But if you are a member, you can plan trips using its online tool. There are places to stop, hotels, and much more, all vetted by AAA. The only caveat I have for you on this site is to make your trips day by day instead of linking them all together in one large trip. The site has a tendency to get overwhelmed with large trips. Am I the only one doing cross-country trips? Really?

Mapquest has pretty much the same feature...you just click what you want to see to show hotels, restaurants, activities, etc. The buttons are just on top of the map.

Another site I found useful was mapofplay.kaboom.org. If you have kids, it is helpful to know where playgrounds are located along the route. I now have a list of playgrounds...just in case.

Booking Hotels:
I didn't often use AAA to book a hotel, because their website is a little clunky, didn't always have the best rates, and didn't include many hotels that were acceptable for me and my family.

I found that Booking.com was my favorite for hotels. Sometimes a cheaper price can be found using the hotel's website, sometimes not. Booking.com, though, allows you to book multiple rooms with different parameters. For us, we have four rooms, each with a different number of people - and children. Most websites didn't accommodate the differences. Hotels.com is also one of my favorites, but this site has you pay up-front for hotels. Bleh.

Making Travel Books:
Oh, yes, I did. I made books for us to travel with, spiral-bound and everything. Pockets serve as our cover and as a way to store any paperwork we collect along the way (brochures, maps, etc.). Each section starts with overview directions, followed by information on each place we could be stopping. They are pretty thick - so much so that I had to separate the trip out to Jersey from the trip back home. S'okay.

I chose spiral binding because we can keep the book open to wherever we are, instead of trying to manage a sheaf of unbound pages, or worse, trying to not break the binding on a tape-bound book. Yes, this is where my training as an editor/publisher of training manuals comes into play.

Planning for Food:
This was one of the last steps. Food is not something you have to reserve in advance - unless you are going to a fancy restaurant. I am not going to be doing that with five kids, let me tell you. Travel food was pretty easy. If we are going to be in a cool foodie city (New Orleans, Philly), we eat there. If we are not, we eat out for dinner...that's when we'll be tired and not interested in trying to forage for food.

We're packing breakfasts for when hotels do not provide: cereals, muffins, yogurts and fruit. Easy.

Lunches can be sandwiches, wraps, fruit & cheese, veggies & peanut butter, or salads. When we're not eating out.

Dinners can be salads when we're not eating out - let's face it, after all those calories eating out in a foodie city, we'll need a light dinner!

Then there's the nights we're at the beach house. Since I have kids that will be super-tired of travelling, I'm planning on making dinner and hanging out there at least each evening. So I planned meals that will be easy to make, that can be put together on the table to allow picky eaters to eat only what they please (both kids and adults), and that will be light enough to make up for all the lunches eating out. Again.

I think we're ready.  You will, of course, get pretty constant updates. As often as we have Wi-Fi.

The little ones are ready!

Wahoo! Road trip!

What's Bloomin': It's June!

And June means "Road Trip!" to me - this year, at least.

Before we head off, though, let's see what's been blooming this week in the yard.

Spirea bush: the foliage for this is much more spectacular than the itty-bitty blooms (you can't even really see them in this picture), but anyway...

Ah, there they are! This is what gardeners mean when they say "insignificant" flowers. Tell me, what flower is really insignificant?

Roses: This week, in addition to last week's bright red, we have pink...

And dark red. My front yard is starting to look like a rose garden. Huh.

Iris: I know the yellow ones have been in bloom for a bit, but this week my purple/yellow combo bloomed. It's a little more fun to look at than just the plain yellow. I wish it would double each year, but I have just the same one as last year.

Poppy: this was a surprise for me. Two years ago, when I did starts from my mother-in-law's basement, I planted poppies. A few survived the process and were planted in the garden, but nothing seemed to come of it. So, I forgot that they were even survivors. This year, though, they sprouted these really strange flower buds. They look completely alien to me.

Then, on Friday morning, out came a huge poppy. I bubbled about it all day - to myself, no one else was quite as interested - and am still silly about it. Who knew that it took two years for poppies to bloom? Not me!

Sadly, the road trip means that I won't know what's blooming in the yard throughout the month of June. I might even (sob!) miss a few. But we'll have plenty of happenings going on that no one will probably miss it - even me. Have a great week!