Lake to Ocean

We’re getting back on the road today after four days at my parents’ beautiful lake house in the Poconos. Before this we spent a day at Idlewild and SoakZone in Ligonier, PA – a 5 hour drive from here. I really hate to say this when I know we still have 3 hours to go in the car today and quite a bit more after that to get home . . . but things are going great. The kids have really been troupers in the car.

We’ll see how it goes today though. Lilly has begun feigning an acute, nonspecific tummy ache every time we even mention getting in the car. I would consider the possibility that she gets motion sick in the car, except that just a few days ago she was happy to go on every single spinny ride at Idlewild. And her distress seems to be quickly cured with the offer of a sweet snack or one of the many “surprises” I’ve been doling out here and there to appease her when it seems a meltdown could be on the horizon.

For now, a Toy Story seek and find book seems to have done trick.

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I knew it. I spoke too soon. The relatively short drive between the lake house and Connecticut has been the worst so far. Not terrible, but not good either. We got off on the wrong foot, breaking from our strategy of traveling first during Henry’s morning nap. Instead we planned to hang out in PA for a little while in the morning, have lunch with my family, then get on the road in time for afternoon nap. This was supposed to work since we’re only driving 3 hours today instead of 5, so there’s no need for a side trip to break up the day.

But the morning was a little more stressful than we intended and, due to circumstances beyond our control, lunch got started an hour late, which means we had bored, stressed-out, hungry kids going into lunch, which meant for distracted kids during lunch who hardly eat and take forever when they do. In other words, we got on the road late for nap time with 2 hungry and tired kids and 2 stressed out parents. Now the tears are flowing more than I would like, we’re stuck in our first traffic of the trip, and we’d really like to get to our destination of the day: Elliott’s family’s summer home on the shore in Connecticut.

The Lake to Ocean by MushBrain, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mushbrain.net.