Before getting started with the trip, I want to tell a quick story from a couple of weeks ago. The five of us were out at the beach for the evening and when we were packing up to come home, Max said that he wanted to stay out at the beach and camp for the night. Holly and I played along and said "OK", then started to return to the van with Leo and Henry. Then Leo started sobbing uncontrollably, demanding that we not let Max stay. Holly played it cool and suggested that this was a great deal for Leo, that he could have all the toys and the room to himself…but then Leo blurted out "I don't care. I love Max no matter what." I figure that if the ratio stays at one of these moments for every 500 punches, kicks and insults lobbed, then the two of them will be just fine.
So the trip. The weeks leading up to it were very exciting for us. Holly left work for 16 months at the start of June. The first Monday she spent at home, we pulled the older boys from after school care and Henry from full day care. So for a couple of weeks there, Holly was juggling getting last-minute things sorted out while caring for Henry full-time, Leo part-time and Max, well, parter-time. Meanwhile, we talked up our plans with everyone we knew. This was met with a lot of blank stares, slack jaws and incredulous expressions. You're going where? For how long? WITH the kids? In what? Our confidence in our plan started taking a bit of a beating…but we had a plan and we were sticking to it. After all, we had a wealth of road trip experience to draw on that said everything was going to be just fine (a weekend trip to Guelph, ON (5-6 hours) and a weekend trip to Rochester, NY (4-5 hours). Total. 9-11 hours in a lifetime adds up to wealth, right? Anybody? A little help here?).
This is us the morning of Saturday, June 14th. Look at the hope in our eyes. All that potential about to be realized. It's palpable, isn't it?
The plan for the first day was to warm ourselves up with a short drive to somewhere in the neighbourhood of Hespeler, ON. I suppose I'm being relative when I say short - we wanted to slice the drive from Ottawa to Winnipeg into four chunks to allow us to squeeze in the odd adventure. The distance on day 1 was going to run about 520 km, doable in around 5 hours. This would leave about 19 hours for the other three days, but would at least allow us to introduce the kids to the road gently. The drive itself was fairly straightforward - all highway, all the time. There was a stop off at a Timmy Ho's about two hours in (yikes, their soups were BAD. Bad enough that we pretty much swore off TH soups for the duration of the trip right there. What the heck happened to the soup? It used to be good!) where we ran into two groups of people we knew from Ottawa. The gas there was $1.43/L and would stand as the most expensive gas for a long, long time. Everyone had a nap, although not simultaneously. And this marked the first of about 60 times that the kids asked for their iPod playlist on the trip.
We pulled into the kids' Auntie Krysta and Uncle Stephen's place just before dinner time. The kids were pretty stoked to get out of the van. Especially to go visit family in a house with snakes and an arcade game in the basement! We spent the evening settling in, devouring yummy homemade pizzas and playing with their dog, Mason. It was a great day, the kids were phenomenal and the hospitality was A+.
The next day, we set off for Kitchener-Waterloo to see the sights and visit with friends. We started the day at the aptly-named The Museum, where we got to lie on a bed of nails, see some artifacts from "ancient Egypt" (I don't think the kids have ever referred to Egypt as anything other than "ancient"), play with a water table and see a play interpreting some of Robert Munsch's most popular stories. I also bumped into the coordinator of Trent's Intro Week activities for Champlain College the year I was on staff - we seriously hadn't seen each other since the spring of 1996! Crazy! Here are some pictures from The Museum (including Leo on a BED OF NAILS!!!!).
After hitting a convenience store for slushies (a tactic that would be repeated often over the course of the trip), we drove across town to visit our longtime friend Jenn Backler and her sister Liz. We enjoyed a lovely pool party all afternoon long, followed by a delicious dinner. The weather was amazing and I think that day marked the first swim and sunburn for me on the trip. Oh, there were many of both of these to go around:) A big thank you to Jenn and Liz for having us over!!
Next up: our first foray into the States!
