Trip to Arizona

On Saturday, we left Makenna’s dance recital and started our journey to Arizona for Austin’s med-school graduation! From Michigan to Arizona is a LONG drive and even LONGER when you have two young children, so we ended up spreading out our trip quite a bit. Since it was already late afternoon, we only drove four hours on Saturday and stayed the night in Ohio. On Sunday we drove from Ohio to Springfield, Missouri (about a ten hour drive, add a couple of hours for potty breaks, meals, getting gas, etc.). On Monday we drove from Springfield to Amarillo, Texas. The trip on Monday was only nine hours (plus the couple of hours thrown in there for normal stops), but we did stop for lunch and a visit in Oklahoma City at Austin’s brother and sister-in-law’s house so this day was on-purpose a shorter drive. We finished off our trip on Tuesday, driving twelve hours (plus stops) from Texas to Glendale. After three and a half days in the car, boy were we ever glad to see Glendale! : )

The kids actually did pretty darn well during the drive. In the mornings we would get them up at about 7, get ready and packed up for the day, have breakfast at about 7:30, and be on the road by about 8. In the mornings we would let the kids watch movies on the portable DVD player and then stop for lunch at about noon. After lunch, we had the kids have a “quiet” time (and they even slept a few times! The longest they slept was less than a hour, but for our kids that is an improvement! They usually NEVER fall asleep in the car!). After quiet time we had them just play with their toys until we reached our hotel that evening. They did really well. We had very little fighting and whining (although the kids are getting pretty darn whiney now because they are just SO tired!) and they traveled great! Austin and I spent all of our time listening to books-on-CD so time went by reasonably fast for us (although I HATE driving long distances in the car and am pretty grumpy myself!).

After we reached our hotels in the evenings we had dinner and then let the kids get out some of their energy in the hotel’s pool. They have really enjoyed getting to go swimming every day. Neither kid can swim, but they are starting to get braver with their jumping in the pool and dunking their heads under water. I did bring the camera to the pool one day, but I got very little pictures of Mr. Max. For some reason or another, he was upset and sitting on the edge of the pool pouting in most of the pictures. : )

 

Ha ha, does this crack you up or what? Max is SO sad!

But he eventually got over it…

I wish I could have got a better picture. Before Max would jump in, he would crouch down low and tightly close his eyes and brace himself. It made us laugh so, so hard each and every time!

Now that we are in Arizona, land of the HOT weather, I’m sure we will be hitting the pool even more frequently! : )

I’m really not sure what our plans are the next few days, but I am sure I will posting frequently throughout our trip!