Texas Trip: The Drive

Without question, the thing I dreaded most about our Texas trip was the drive. Our kids travel pretty well, but we'd never gone so far with them before. Plus, it's not like driving along the coast of California or through the mountains of Arizona, with beautiful views to enjoy. We've driven through parts of Texas before we had kids, and I remember it as the most mind-numbing experience of my life! Flat roads and flat desert all the way. I was not looking forward to that.

Little did I know that the worst part of the drive would be what led up to it.

The Sunday before we left, Tiffany offered us her DVD player for the ride. I automatically said no without thinking. Then I realized, this wasn't like putting a movie in for my kids to get from my house to the store (which I frankly think is asinine, sorry). This was over 1000 friggin miles to Texas. Just as I decided to find her and tell her I'd come to my senses, Julie offered us hers. Halleluiah! And she has two screens so we could set it up so all three kids could see a screen at once. Oh yeah.

So I pick that up from her and she kindly sets it up in the van for me. Meanwhile I'm wondering what Brian and I are going to do to save us from dying of boredom along the way. That's when Genny offered us her DVD player. It's one that sits in your lap and I thought it would be perfect for whichever of us was in the passenger seat.

Awesomeness.

Well, the evening before we left, I discovered Julie's player wasn't working. I tried this and that before calling her to see if I was doing something wrong. We figured out the cord that plugs into the cigarette lighter wasn't working, so I go to her house to get a different one. To make a long story short, probably an hour later, we'd gone through an adapter and a different kind of cord I don't even know the name of before we finally got it to work.

Did I say "we"? I meant "her." I had no idea what to do. But it was working and we were so excited! I was impressed with Julie's knowledge of all these technical things.

She unplugged it to rethread the cord and when she plugged it back in, it didn't work anymore. Oy vey.

We figured out it blew a fuse.

Okay. Well, so I gathered everything up and took it home to Brian to sort the rest out. He replaced the fuse, tried it again, and it blew a fuse again. He tried it in his car, out of curiosity I guess, and it blew that fuse too. Determined, Brian tried it one more time and this time it not only blew the fuse but even after replacing the fuse our radio no longer worked. True, we did still have Genny's, but I didn't want to use it because I was afraid the kids might drop it, and I know my kids well enough to know that they would just fight over who got to hold the screen anyway. As far as I'm concerned, boredom is better than fighting.

So now I was looking at a trip through the desert with no movies and now no radio. Add to that we found out the kids had been telling everyone in the neighborhood we'd be gone for five days so now we were worried we'd be robbed while we were gone. Plus when I ran to Target to get something (I can't even remember what now), Brian called me on the way and told me his shoe just ripped and I'd have to get another pair. It was pretty late due to all these delays and we still needed to finish packing so we could leave at 3 o'clock in the morning. I was tired and stressed and I just let all this weigh down on me.

I was starting to feel like this trip was doomed. I had a terrible feeling about everything, so much so that I didn't even want to go. But Brian suggested we say a prayer and that really helped. After that I knew we'd be fine, the house would be fine, and it'd be a great trip. And it was.

In spite of having no movies, and having to make do with a portable radio/CD player that liked to skip on the bumps, the drive was not that bad at all. The kids slept a lot...




... except Ben, but he was cheerful so I didn't mind...





In between their naps (and ours) I finished reading a book to them which was fun. Plus the scenery through the southern part of Texas (while still peppered with plenty of long, boring stretches) had some interesting parts too. We saw plenty of what makes Texas famous: trains, cattle and oilfields.

(We love trains, so it was fun counting the cars as we drove by. The longest train we saw had 4 engines and 115 cars!!)

I like the oil pumps because I think they look like great iron birds. Which is funny, because at the rest stop in Las Cruces, NM where we stopped for sandwiches, we saw this great iron bird:




The sculpture was made from all kinds of random items. This is a shot of its underbelly - you can see all the graffiti on it too. I spy a keyboard and lots and lots of shoes.

I think we just chanced upon the coolest rest stop ever. I loved this sculpture. The view was pretty too.





Of course, my foot was there as well...




Deeper into Texas, we saw windmills like they have on the drive to California. The kids think these are so cool (so do we).


And on the way back, we saw half a dozen semis carrying bits and pieces of one of these windmills. This has two arms of the windmill:



Speaking of the drive home (which was made easier because we got our radio fixed in Dallas - it was a different fuse that had blown and not the one marked "radio" which is bizarre - but seeing that it only took 10 minutes and $1.46 to get my radio back, I was not complaining!)... anyway, as I was saying, poor Ben was sick the whole way home. He was either throwing up or sleeping, poor little guy.

But when we pulled over once, and Brian and the boys entertained themselves by making the truckers pull their horns:

Ben had to drag himself out of the car and try it too:

It was the most activity we saw from him all day.

All told, we traveled over 2100 miles there and back, and over 200 miles right there in Dallas, so it was a ton of driving. But the boys did well and it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared. In fact, I'm hoping we have a reason to do it again someday. :)