Road Trip

Just got back from a short trip…..well, short in terms of time (five days) but not distance (1400 miles).

We started off early Wednesday morning en route to Fort Wayne, IN, where we spent the night. The next morning we drove through Amish country to a small town where my dh’s family is from. We had a wonderful time visiting with relatives from both sides of his family. When we arrived, we found out that if we’d come a day earlier, we would have found ourselves driving in a terrible ice storm.

On Friday we headed to St. Louis. It started to snow right when we left, but the roads weren’t bad, and by the time we left Indianapolis, the snow had stopped. The area we drove through would get between 12 and 20 inches of snow over the next 24 hours. Once again, great timing. I can’t take credit for these instances of missing hazardous weather except for the fact that I did pray for good travel before we left, more than once. :)

It took most of the day to get to St. Louis, where we visited our son at work, met some of his very nice coworkers, and saw his place of business. He loves his job, and we’re very happy to see that.

Dinner was prepared by our son and his bride; it was delicious. We visited them again the next day, and went to church with them and her family. Since we haven’t found a church home yet, we really enjoyed being there. Then we all went back to the newlyweds’ apartment, where we dined on frozen pizza and birthday cake, because it was dsds15’s birthday. That’s right, my youngest is 15. This makes me feel somewhat old. But it’s always a celebration, because we weren’t sure he would make it through his first week of life because of the problems he developed soon after birth.

We left for home very early the next morning (ugh, time change Sunday made it even harder to get up early) and arrived home in time for dinner last night.

Some observations about the trip back:

1) Gas prices are ridiculously high. We even saw diesel at over $4 a gallon.
2) I finally tried using the cruise control on our car and liked it. I’d always avoided it because I thought I would be less alert if I didn’t have to concentrate on staying near the speed limit (not one of my strengths). But it didn’t work out that way. I stayed awake the whole time I drove…always a good thing.
3) In addition to all the great home-cooked food shared with us by family members, we also ate at restaurants and fast food places while on the road. I find that as I get older, I like fast food less and appreciate home cooking much more.
4) You can get really tired of the same six CDs when you drive 1400 miles in five days. Not that they weren’t great CDs (Carly Simon, WOW’s Best of Gospel, Paul McCartney, Chicago, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Count Basie), but we heard them too many times.

So that’s where I’ve been lately. And if you hung on all the way through to the end of this post, you must be avoiding the dinner dishes or something because it’s not a very exciting post. ;)