Well, last night we stayed Paul's parent's lake house in Sunrise Beach, MO. We made it there in about 7 and a half hours with a couple stops. I think we may have even set a record for the time it's taken us to get there!
We've made it a quest on this trip to take a picture of our family's stores. Not really owned by us, just stores with any of our names in the title. We decided to do it right after we missed Gracie's Antiques, but we did get a picture by Paul's Supermarket! Unfortunately, Ellie's head got a bit in the way, but it's "Paul's" none-the-less!
In order to help pass the time, we've got some fun car games going on. There's Peep Bingo (sort of like Car bingo where you spot animals and things along the road, but you get to eat a Marshmellow Peep if you get a bingo!), an ongoing 100-item scavenger hunt list, and a few others that I'll mention later. One of the favorites is the 100-mile Treat Game. Every 100 miles everyone gets some sort of small treat or prize. It can be a small sheet of stickers to put in their Roadtrip Journal, or new fun thing to play with, or something to eat. It's making the miles go by pretty fast and it's a fun interuption to the boring-ness of driving. One of the treats today was to make candy necklaces. This one was a winner! It took them some time to do it, and they could eat it for the rest of the 100 miles.
A family vacation just isn't right without a few bumps in the road, right?... Today, Our "bumps" were like mini-mountains. Ellie threw-up at some point along the way, but was hardly noticed because around the same time, we hit some NASTY weather. We started around 6:30 am and made it through Missouri, but as we hit Oklahoma around 9-ish, we hit snow. Yeah, snow... that horrid white stuff that we tried so hard to escape. And it wasn't just flurries... Tulsa and Oklahoma City were supposed to get 6 to 8 inches and we were headed right through it! Now, if it were Illinois, it wouldn't have been nearly as much of a problem, but Oklahoma is so far south, they don't know what to do when it snows that much! Adding to the problem was the rain that was freezing under the snow from the night before. It was making sheets of ice all over the roads.
When it snows back home, they break out the snow plows and throw down the salt. Apparently in Oklahoma, they get out their 3 snowplows and sprinkle some sand, then they break out a gazillion tow-trucks to get everyone out of the ditches because no one has a clue how to drive in the snow and ice! We saw so many cars in the ditch... I wish we had started counting in the beginning. There had to be close to 100. Some of them were towing campers or trailers that the wind caught and flipped off the road. Others must have been driving really stupid because they were soooo far off the road, it seemed almost impossible to get where they were stuck.
But... in the end, we made it through the snow storm, just finished eating,and took a swim in our hotel's indoor pool to burn off some energy. Just getting to the hotel safely was a huge weight off our shoulders (and Paul was finally able to pry his fingers off the steering wheel). We are about 3 hours shy of where we wanted to camp overnight (even though we put in an 11 hour driving day), but we are thanking God that we are safe and in our nice, warm Mariott Presidential Suite (come on, you didn't really think that all 8 of us could fit in a normal hotel room, did you?).
On-the-road Homeschooling Lesson Number 2: Never pack your swimsuits in the pop-up camper when you MIGHT stay at a hotel with a swimming pool. (Yes, we DID crank up the camper under the hotel's entrance canopy just to get our swimsuits out!)
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