We took our first road trip with four kids, that’s what we did. When we lived in California, a road trip was a six hour drive from Southern California to San Jose with a max of two stops if things were really getting crazy. Now that we live in Colorado, a road trip is a 16 hour, thousand-mile trek that requires spending the night somewhere in the desert and packing with the economy and precision I’m pretty sure my dad employed when he built space shuttles.
I always have a momentary freak-out as we’re leaving. I worry that I’ve forgotten something and I continue to worry until I remember something I actually have forgotten and then I can deal and move on. Unless it’s one of the kids, we can improvise. I also panic briefly when I realize I’m in a car for two days with five other people and only one of them is really very responsible and exactly none of them agree with me that farting is not funny (this includes the baby. She thinks it’s hilarious.)
The drive was surprisingly easy considering we had a baby, two older kids and a halfway potty trained kid. He would wait until about 20 miles after the “No Services for 100 miles” sign and then announce loudly he had to go to the bathroom. By the time we got him to one, he would go in, spend about ten minutes inspecting it, then decide he didn’t have to go anymore. Once he was back in the car and we were on the road again, he’d have an accident.
The week at Tahoe was wonderful, which means I don’t have many stories. I have a theory that the worst trips make the best stories. The trips my parents and siblings and I laugh about include the camping trip where my parents forgot the tent poles, tied the tent to a tree and then kept snickering because they could tell everyone walking by was dying to point out they had gotten this whole tent thing wrong but no one did. And my personal favorite — the trip where my parents tried to find everything from a campsite to a place to eat to an ATM in the state of Washington, found none of those things, decided they hated the entire state and drove through the night from Canada to Oregon just to get out of it. As a final grand gesture, they let my seven year old brother go potty against the side of a park restroom at 2 am because they couldn’t find any open bathrooms either. So you see my point — good stories.
I did get a run in while I was up there, which was beautiful. It was sunset and the boats on the water were silhouetted against the orange sky. So pretty. And I got a huge boost from a group of people sitting on the pier who cheered me on and yelled, “Get out of her way! She looks like she could run a marathon, that one! Go, go, go!” My ego was not at all deflated when I realized they were completely high and probably went on to cheer the geese for their amazing swimming as soon as I was gone.
So we had an awesome time that week, hanging out with my parents and getting the kids to the lake every day for swimming and some serious sandcastle building. If it all falls apart for us here for some reason, you’ll find us at the cabin. Unless it’s lunch time in which case I might suggest checking the In-N-Out.