The trip …

Well our trip to Minneapolis is winding down … we’re in our hotel in West Virginia for the final night. We’ve got about 7 hours to go – it was just too much to do in one day.   We are really looking forward to getting home (and having home cooked meals) and getting back into our routine. Plus, Nana will be there when we get home tomorrow!!!   Unfortunately, we both have to work on Monday.  Ugh.

We had a great time in Minneapolis seeing Kay graduate and Ben play baseball … and visiting my family in Wisconsin and friends in Chicago.  (We even have Portillos to bring home…and I had Lou Malnati’s Pizza last night, yeah!)

The kids have been 100X better than we anticipated (thank God to the person who invented CAR TVs!!)  Snacks helped too.  They get a little cranky after about 8 hours, but what’s to be expected, ya know?

The trip wasn’t TOTALLY uneventful … poor Sam got two speeding tickets in Wisconsin – the last one at 1:30 in the morning and only 15 miles from our hotel.  The trooper was a …witch.  With a B.   Funny insert: the trooper asked Sam why he was speeding to which he WANTED to reply “to get there faster, DUH” (but he didn’t say that of course) … and when she wrote him the ticket he tossed it on the dashboard and as we drove away he said “Man she was a b—ch!”  All three kids had just woken up (it was 1:30 in the morning) and they kept saying “man she was a b---ch” until he finally got them to believe he said she was a WITCH.  The (not so) funny thing is that we re-routed our GPS to take us off the highway and through back roads because it was the shortest distance, rather than the fastest time.  Had we not have done that … it’s likely that Sam wouldn’t have gotten that second ticket.  All about choices.

We are afraid Zach’s future might be in the police field – he was the OFFICIAL watcher of the no U-turn signs, no left turn signs, caution signs, are we speeding, etc.  Every U-turn, he was all over Sam about why we were turning around, was there a  no U-Turn sign, etc.  What a goof.

Oh and by the way we got a cracked windshield … just our luck, right, since our car has a cracked windshield too?!   We hit traffic in some areas, but NOTHING like the traffic we hit coming back to Chicago last night … we officially decided there is no way in hedoublehockeysticks could we live with that much traffic anymore.

Just a quick thanks to the friends and family who showed us above and beyond hospitality….as well as our babysitter, Liz, who watched the animals for us this last week.

Well …… Signing out from Huntington, WV ….

Lots of love to all …

Rachel

PS:  Congrats to our nanny Rachel who got married tonight!