cat named pig

I really love being on the road, going anywhere that is not our house for a few nights or longer. And while we can’t afford to do the sort of international travel we really crave, at least not at this point in our lives, we console ourselves by “training” for it with little road trips here and there. (If marathon runners “trained” for their marathons by jogging a mile every week or two while eating a pizza and drinking beer, that would probably be the equivalent of our driving to Michigan for five days as “training” for spending a year abroad. But, like I said, it’s what we tell ourselves so we don’t get all bummed out about our boringness.)

And I actually think there is some merit to the comparison — if you can’t survive several days of four or more hours in the car together, there’s no way you’ll survive an overseas flight as a family. The two situations are fairly similar: kids are buckled into seats where the only options available for entertainment include coloring, reading, or finding new ways to drive Mom and Dad crazy. There are snacks, but not many decent options for meals. Annoying behavior is regulated with bribes much more frequently than at home, as time-outs are not really an option in such close quarters. And everyone is grateful to get out of there at the end of the day.

So anyway, we are home from our Marquette/Duluth Spring Break Trip (to visit our friends Heather and Sean and the adorable Baby Harland, and to spend one night at a water park hotel in Duluth). We are tired and everything smells like chlorine, but it was a very fun little vacation.

The following are a few key points I’d like to remember for the next trip:

1. Do not take Siena along for the pre-trip snack shopping. She will select some things you just know everyone is going to hate, like banana chips (I think bananas are disgusting, and they are no better in chip form, just less healthy and exponentially more likely to make everyone’s breath smell like a rotting corpse). She will also select fruit snacks and not stop talking about them for one single minute of the time leading up to the trip or the duration of the trip. She will ask for so many fruit snacks that you will lose all patience and threaten never to buy them again FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE (and you will say it like that, all caps, in your patented Don’t Mess With Mama Voice) and then she will cry and you will feel bad. But not bad enough to give her more fruit snacks.

2. Expect more whining than you ever hear in a typical day at home. If you expect this, you won’t be constantly shaking your head and looking at your partner with a baffled expression, asking why they are being so whiny.

3. Any meal they eat that is not mac and cheese or grilled cheese is a pleasant surprise, an unexpected bonus point scored for Team Nutrition, and NO, they won’t try something familiar that looks slightly different so don’t bother asking.

4. When booking hotels, if you cheap out and decide not to go for the two-room suite, be sure to ask about the size of the bathrooms. This will be important when you put the kids to bed and then sit in the bathroom reading for two hours — the best hotels will have bathrooms big enough for you to drag a chair into, so you don’t have to sit on the toilet or in the bathtub.

5. Stickers. Just, stickers.

On the whole, it was a good time. It was great to see Heather and Sean and the new baby, the kids loved playing with their dogs more than perhaps anything else (except the fruit snacks), and I only muttered “I’m going to KILL someone” a few times under my breath. More trip stories and/or photos coming in the next few days, I’m sure.