Shoptaw Family Vacation, Part 1: The Trip Up

I figured the St. Louis/Ohio vacation would be best broken into various sections, so as to not overwhelm you with either verbage or pictures. So we'll start with the beginning. Seems like a very good place to start.

After getting the whole van thing situated, Meron did a lot of the packing of the vehicle Thursday night, so there was little to take out Friday morning. This is a good thing, because "Friday morning" was just barely that, as the alarm went off at about 2:30. As my wife likes to say, "Those are not the wee hours but the wee wee hours, because the only reason you should be up is to wee wee."

Benjamin had thrown a fit Thursday night during packing when we didn't leave right then. I think he was all excited about the van and everything. However, I wasn't going to take off without at least a couple of hours of sleep. I think I wound up with 4 1/2 not solid hours, which was enough to get us there.

That said, about 30 minutes up the road, it was "I want to go home". That was a refrain that we heard occasionally during the first part of the trip. He got over it, though, and settled into to watching DVDs once the sun came up.

Sarah, for the most part, did pretty well also. She slept a lot on the way up, fussing usually around bottle time. We were able to make them up in the car, so it didn't slow us down much in the drive.

We didn't have any problems (of course, thanks to our Google maps!) getting to the zoo in St. Louis. We hit it about 10:45 or so, which meant we made reasonable time. More on the St. Louis bit in another post.

Saturday morning, we left out of St. Louis a little before 8 AM. We stopped early in Illinois for breakfast (I think the only part of Illinois that Meron saw, as she was conked out soon afterwards!), drove through Indiana and wound up in Columbus close to 4 PM (EDT). Took the wrong exit in Columbus, but thankfully it was just farther down the same road we needed to be on and we could call Meron's friends to talk us into the ice cream place.

After we left there, we drove down to Meigs County, where Meron's family is. That was the worst part of the drive. It's a nice drive usually, and Meron actually drove most of it (after I got us out of Columbus--she's worse about driving in big cities than I am). Unfortunately, Sarah apparently was getting tired of driving, because she fussed quite loudly most of the way down there. I tried distracting her some and it worked to a point, but we were very glad to get her out of the car. She didn't settle completely down, but at least we weren't in a closed-in space with her!

All in all, the drive up was smooth. The van was nice and all that room really panned out well. The kids were, on the most part, really well behaved. I think Benjamin got on Meron's nerves some as she was sitting back there with him, but they didn't bother me up in the front, and Sarah didn't go on any crying jags when I was dealing with big cities, so I was happy!