The Journey

In believing that the journey is just as important as the destination, especially when it comes to family road trips, I put on my big girl pants and tried to make the most of our stops on both our way to and from Breckenridge during our little vacay last week. 

Meaning, we played a lot of red light, green light each time we stopped in an effort to get the bigs to stretch their legs as much as they could in as little time possible to keep the our wheels moving down the road (sometimes also referred to as the submarine {suburban} or our new monster truck race car by the kids. I think the latter makes sense, depending on whose driving.) 

When we decided to leave a day earlier than we had planned and split up the drive to Breck, we didn't see the plague about to hit our house. Or Hand Foot and Mouth disease, to be exact. 

Nelle contracted it from who knows where and had it on the 4th of July, Henry got it a few days later, and Andrew was miserable as we headed west towards the mountains. He wasn't allowed to touch anyone or anything, so I packed us, loaded us, he drove, and when we stopped for breaks, all three of the kids and I packed into a tiny gas station stall and somehow didn't pick up other diseases as they touched everyyyyyything, and I simultaneously held June, hoisted Nelle onto the toilet, buttoned buttons, etc. 

And why yes! This WAS as easy as you are imagining.

So, here we were waiting on dinner, and the kids could have spent hours throwing rocks into these puddles because to them, they had found a pond, and there may have been fish in them, they weren't actually throwing rocks at all, but feeding the fish, just as we weren't behind Subway in Goodland at all either, but rather in exactly the right place they needed to burn off their energy and pretend and be able to answer yes when they asked, "are we on vacation now?" just as they did immediately as we backed out of our driveway.

Yes, yes. 

Even a deserted lot in Goodland, Kansas is part of vacation if you let it be.

More to come...