Blogs from a trip...

May 13, 2007
11 a.m.

Superb.

The laptop won’t/can’t connect to the wireless network at the coffee shop, and it looks like I brought the wrong files with me for building my business website.

So there goes my morning agenda. I thought I would check my email, work a bit on my website…that sort of thing.

Sigh.

So with my café mocha quickly cooling, I guess I’ll recap our trip.

We had meant to leave the house at about 7 p.m., go get dinner, and then be on the road by 8 p.m. The plan was to drive all night, and arrive in Denver around 8 a.m. or so.

We ended up not leaving the house until 7:30 p.m., at which point we had to take Doug’s car to the airport so he’d have it there when he flew back on Sunday. That was a small fiasco in and of itself (the man should have a GPS installed in his HEAD, dammit). We stopped at Casa Gallardo out on St Charles Rock Road for dinner, and that killed another good hour. Because we were going to be driving all night, we felt that large infusions of caffeine would be beneficial. So since we had to take I-70 West for the trip anyway, we decided to take a side detour at Picasso’s for coffee. While we were there, we might as well put the kids into diapers and pajamas. Right. Where did you put the diapers?

Diapers?

Well I didn’t pack the diapers.

Well *I* didn’t pack the diapers!

David, didn’t you take the diapers out of your room when you took your suitcase?

Uh-OH!! Nooooooo!

Oh. The diapers are still in David’s room.

Well…at least we’re close to home again!! We went home, changed the kids, stuffed everyone into the car, and got going. So in reality we didn’t end up being on the road until about 10:30 p.m.

We let the kids put on headphone and watch Baby Einstein (why they think this is so wonderful, I’ll never know), then pulled into a rest area to throw away the empty coffee cups and kick the carseats back so they could recline a bit more.

Doug starts muttering “What the HELL?” and sounding generally unhappy. “What’s going on?”

“Her carseat is UNSTRAPPED!” he says incredulously. “The belt itself that keeps it in the SEAT is undone!” Undone?? In a strange turn of events, both David and Lauren claim responsibility for pushing the red seat belt button and releasing the latch. There’s a long conversation about car seat safety and a few dire threats and predictions. Doug re-hooks the seat belt, we recline the seats, pass out stuffed animals of choice, bundle up small bodies with favorite blankies, and we’re off.

It took about 10 minutes for the backseat passengers to fall asleep. Doug called his mom to let her know that we were starting the trip.

We hit Columbia pretty quickly. I have a horrible time sleeping in the car on a usual basis, and the wretched, heinous sunburn of mine didn’t help any. I slept for an hour around midnight, and then from around 3 a.m. to 4 a.m. or so, at which point I was digging around for $2 for the Kansas toll road. At 4:30 a.m. we HAD to find a gas station so I could re-do the sunburn.

For the record, I got the sunburn on Sunday after going to the Tour de Fun at the JCC. We were outside for about three hours on an overcast day. I got a sunburn. Face, forearms, chest. Not that big of a deal, I put lots of lotion on it and that seemed to be just fine. Monday it’s fine, Tuesday it’s fine. On Wednesday it goes berserk, and decides to sting and itch like MAD. ?!?!? It’s insanely bad. I spent 14 hours glued to the couch with ice packs constantly on my chest. (Mind you, the sunburn on my arms and face are entirely gone by this point.) Each pack melts in about 30 minutes. By the end of the 14 hours or so, the burning sensation gives way to itching, but I can’t scratch because the burned skin will scream bloody murder. We solve this with a heavy layer of hydrocortisone cream (Cortaid), followed with a heavy layer of lanolin (Lansinoh). Taking a shower every six hours and then reapplying the creams kept things down to a functional level for the last part of Thursday and most of Friday.

So now every six or eight hours I have to take the remaining cream off my chest with a freezing cold, wet washcloth and redo the stupid thing.

Since I wasn’t sleeping anyway, I decided to take over driving. Did I mention that western Kansas/eastern Colorado have NOTHING to recommend it? Flat. Desolate. The ONLY reason that settlers would move here is because THIS is where the ox died. Gads. I can’t image trying to live out here.

I kept awake listening to the iPod. Bill Moyers has a pod cast that he puts out once a week, and the special I was listening to lasted for about an hour or so. I also listened to a couple of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me archives.

By 6 a.m., David was awake, and since the sun was up there was no WAY he wanted to go to sleep again. We hit Colby, Kansas pretty soon after that. I had used Google Earth before we left to find Starbucks on the route, and there was one in Colby. (Population 5,000.) Cows and tractors outnumber people at least 15:1.) It was in a travel plaza sort of thing, so Doug filled the van’s gas tank while I took David inside to find a restroom. He was insanely excited. “Look, Mom, a COFFEE shop!” he yelped, jumping up and down in the parking lot in his bare feet and dinosaur pajamas. I wouldn’t let him RUN to the bathroom, so he hopped all the way there instead.

I took him back outside to Dad, and then went in and got a couple of hot chocolates and muffins for the kids, and coffees and apple fritters for us. The Starbucks folks were VERY nice, and even put the muffins in fancy white boxes so the kids felt like they were getting little presents instead of breakfast when we sat them up and handed out the booty.

We drove to….hmmm….Burlington? Limon? I’m not sure which. We stopped to top off the tank and stuff the kids into a bathroom (They ATE. We know what comes next.) And we got a couple of postcards. Most of them featured Denver and the like. “Do you have any REALLY regional ones, or are they all Denver and Pikes Peak and things like that?” I asked. “No, we really don’t have anything regional. There’s nothing OUT here,” said the teenaged clerk with painful sincerity. Well…no, there’s not. Gotta admit that! I dug around in the suitcases and found clothes for the kids to wear and got them changed in the van.

Doug drove the rest of the way and we got in around 10:30 or 11:30 a.m. David was once again so excited that I thought he might blow up. “Alright,” I said, “Why don’t you run up and knock on the door and tell Grandma we’re here.” He shot out of van and ran up to the door, and then hesitated. He had to gather up the courage to knock.

We unpacked and then went to lunch, and went to the Denver Aquarium. They had a petting zoo out front, which Lauren was more interested in than David was. (She handles spontaneity MUCH better than David does.) She got to hold a blue-tongued skink, a turtle, and she got to RIDE a tortoise. She wanted a pony ride, but those were $4 each, so she didn’t get one.

Inside we saw too many fish to recount, including sharks and morel eels. They also have tigers in one of the exhibits, and I got a very nice photo of him. David was a little scared of the sharks at first. “Daddy, can I hide behind you and peek?” he asked tentatively. “Well, shoot,” said Dad. “I was hoping I could hide behind YOU and peek!” David grinned. “No, Dad!” So he hid for a little bit, but after he figured out that the sharks were behind glass and they really weren’t going to try and come after him, he got much braver. David and Lauren both got to crawl under some of the aquariums and look up through little “bubbles” on the floor, and later on they both got to reach out and pet a stingray. (We love stingrays!)

Once we got home, Doug went to take a nap, and I ended up collapsing on the couch for a nap myself! A couple of hours later we took Grandma to dinner at Texas Roadhouse for her birthday, and gave her the pins that the kids had picked out. David sat there at dinner, blinking owlishly, and pretty soon he closed his eyes and leaned his head against Dad’s arm and fell asleep. He just couldn’t help himself.

Doug had to pack for his flight the next day, so we headed back. While he did that I picked out pajamas for the kids and clothes for them for the next day, and tried to clean up the living room a LITTLE bit.

We all went to bed around 11 p.m. or so. And Doug and I got up this morning at 6 a.m. and snuck out of the house to go to the airport. On the way back I hit the coffee shop to take advantage of their free WiFi.

So much for that! And by now the dregs of my coffee are stone cold, and I would do well to pack up and head back to mom’s house.