Road Trip!

This year was our year to spend Christmas with John's family.  We decided to take the big journey up to Virginia to see John's brother and his family.  As we refuse to do plane trips due to a certain fateful red-eye from Alaska to Texas, this meant ROAD TRIP!

Folks, I have never been more thankful for John's technological (dare I say it) genius!  Witness a sample of the arrangements from within the car.

That is just a small sample of the wiring John finagled.  Here is what he wrote about it, "For the trip, I installed a new head unit, mainly to connect all of our smart devices (was really tired of the fm modulated junk), hard wired an inverter to the battery, decorated the luggage rack with led Christmas lights, installed radios to communicate with my small caravan, bought BT headphones for the kids to listen and play with their iPad/DVD player, installed sat radio, while using my phone as a wifi and using navigon on my iPad for navigation.  But, probably the highlight of the tech trip was pushing Carys' movies from my iPod located up front to the DVD player in the back so we don't have to get out of the car or stretch over the backseat to change movies." So, umm, ya, he did....that.  Between that and the large box full of a variety of snacks, the actual driving was pretty easy - especially considering that this 3000+ mile round trip involved a 2 year old and a 4 year old. The main limitation was that we had to stop for lunch pretty much exclusively at restaurants that had attached playgrounds.  I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to eat McDonald's ever.again.

Once we arrived in Virginia, Josh and Amy had a house full.  6 adults and 5 kids, 5 and under.  It was like contained chaos, but the kids had a blast.  The neat thing is that for a short time every year, all of the cousins thus far will stair-step as far as age.  Dawson is 5; Cora is 4; Audrey is 3; Carys is 2; and Ryan is 1.  

This is the best picture we could get of the 5 of them.  Like herding cats, folks!

It was so much fun listening to the kids playing together.  Surprisingly, we had very few problems, especially considering that the kids only get to see each other once or twice a year.  The main difficulty was getting the kids to go.to.sleep!  The three bigs had a slumber party every night, and it was pretty hard to rein in the giggles coming from their room.  Though, if that is the worst we have to deal with, we are pretty lucky!

Our drive home was quite an adventure.  We were blasted with the very southern tip of the huge winter storm that graced the Northeast.  It took us 12 and a half hours to get from northern Virginia to our hotel in Knoxville, TN.  I am pretty sure that a very valid way to increase this completely Southern girl's total trust in God is to spend 12 and a half hours in the car driving through 500 miles icy snow and sleet.  Thankfully, we arrived safely. The next two days were much less eventful weather-wise, thankfully!   Nevertheless, we were so happy to have arrived back at our house on Friday night.  I'm fairly certain my bed has never felt so comfortable!

All in all, it was a lovely trip.  We are so thankful to have had the opportunity to spend it with family.