Drive to Vermont, Day 1

Departure time, 6am on Monday.  The truck was packed the night before, leaving only room for the two kids int he back seat, and me in the dirver's seat.  Everything else, in the cab, and in the back of the truck, was packed to the ceiling, with very limited air pockets.  The kids and I have a good routine for road trips now.  It's a long day of close quarters, games and songs and chattering with my mostly undivided attention, and short term goals in the form of juice boxes, treats, meals, rest stops, etc.

Lots of rest stops.  They discovered magic toilets, (auto-flushing,) and hot air hand dryers.  

Lunch time!  A little something I whipped together in the front seat, chips/pb&j/sliced apples.  

The kids love to help. Each fuel stop turned into a car washing stop as well.  This also became one of the short term treat/goals that helped make the trip surprisingly painless.

They both get so focused when they're doing something like this.

Dinner!  This was a bit mind bending, I took a random exit somewhere around Columbus, Ohio, and managed to stumble into the Huntington Bank territory, a place I've been a number of times on business.  The area is suffering, half the restaurants the GPS pointed us to were out of business.  We ended up as the only dine-in customers at a pizza hut.  (Why is it that all pizza huts smell so bad?)


The kids had a lot of pent up energy; they spent most of the time before the pizza came out dancing to the sounds coming out of the TV.

They zonked out some time around 8, after being up beat and friendly all day.  I kept going for a couple-three more hours, and stopped some time before midnight around Cleveland.  The kids had a hard time of the transition from sleeping in the car to sleeping in the hotel, and checking in with a snoozy, upset child in each arm was a bit of a challenge, but we made it into our room with limited issues.

They had another little burst of energy, which was a bit hard to take for a very tired me, but it all worked out.  The hotel turned out to be a diamond in the rough, but we'll cover that in day 2 of the trip.