Well, I totally thought that I would update our trip while on the road trip daily, like I used to do on Facebook… But do it here. But since we were all sleeping in the van together, and that I never have a moment alone or a break, there was no chance I was going to have time to be downloading pictures, and sharing about the adventures. The truth though? There were a lot of hard things. The first three days were really rough and I wanted to come home. I could see that this was not going to go really well. I ended up having a chat with the kids and they really wanted to finish it out so we kept going. We got into a little bit of a groove and it got better, but after about a week and I was still so exhausted and kids were fighting, nights were cold, I really just felt like we needed to come home! Again, kids insisted we finish it out and after a chat with them their behavior was a little bit better and we finished it out. However, in the end, we ended it a day early because of weather.
The short story is… We had some fun adventures, we did some fun things. I wish I could say it was the best trip ever, but it wasn’t. The nights were cold and squishy and uncomfortable. There was more arguing and fighting and being whiny about things than I cared to deal with. Certain kids were more than helpful, but certain kids weren’t very helpful and that would make the more helpful kids (and me) get frustrated. I’m anxious to go back and make a magazine of all the good parts that happened so hopefully those are the memories that are remembered.
However, I am disappointed that it didn’t go better and that it ended so stressful having to come home because of weather and having to try to figure out how the heck we were going to get home without going through such extreme weather. Luckily we did, we took a very unconventional route home, trying to avoid as much weather as possible and I’m just grateful that we made it home.
