Travel

In order to make writing about vacation easier, I have broken the trip into six segments. This time we drove to Michigan. Since it was going to be so long in the car, we thought it would be better (especially for Julia’s sake) if we broke the trip up into two days each way.

Julia was simply wonderful during our travel time. Don’t get me wrong, we had a few different times of crying. But overall she slept the majority of the way. I really don’t think we could have expected her to be any better. We traveled for about 3 hours until she was awake and hungry and made a long (1 ½ hour) meal break. By that point we only had about 3 hours until we reached our destination. It worked out really well.

I packed quite a bit of entertainment for Chloe in the car. Before we left I found a tray that attaches to our car seat. That was a wonderful purchase! She loved sitting and coloring. Her other favorite activity was her ABC bottle. I made an “I Spy” bottle with alphabet beads. It was an old water bottle filled 2/3 with rice. Then I put in two sets of alphabet beads and some colored beads just to make it a little prettier. She just loved turning the bottle around and shaking it to find different letters.

Chloe traveled pretty well until she got tired. Then she really fought sleep for a while and was quite crabby. The last leg of the trip home she was insisting that I couldn’t nap. “Mommy, no nap” was the phrase of the afternoon. Then we had a lovely conversation that went something like this:
“Hey, Mommy!”
“What?”
“Mooommmyyyyyy……”
“What Chloe?”
“Hey Mommy…..”
“What do you want Chloe?”
“Mommy…..”
“Chloe…..”
“Mommy…..”
“Chloe…..”
“Hey Mommy!”
“What Chloe?”
“Hi.”
(sigh) “Hi.”

The best part of the travel experience for me was our first day of travel back home. One of Kevin’s aunts was going to be traveling and stopping to the spend the night only 30 minutes from where we were stopping to spend the night. So I switched seats with Kevin’s cousin and was able to have adult conversation for several hours without Chloe interruptions. It was so nice.

We hit some pretty fierce storms in Michigan on our way up. We saw a tree that had snapped in two and was blocking all lanes of traffic westbound. Conditions at one point were practically a white-out with the wind driving the rain directly into our windshield. Kevin said was by far the worst storm he’s ever driven in. We were (of course) grateful for a safe arrival.