Great Expectations

After countless hours at the computer reconfiguring this route and that route I have come up with what I hope will be a great road trip. We will be leaving Monday morning the 13th of July. Can it be a luckier day? If I have done the math correctly we will have covered 3,354 miles when we reach our house again in 8 days. There was a bit of a lovelier direction to go, but it took us a few extra hours out of the way. After I had a few family members give me a look that said, "wow. That's a lot of driving" and then they SAID, "wow. That's a lot of driving". I got very nervous. The more I thought about it, the more driving it was. Sort of like the longer you look at a spider the bigger it gets, you know? But I wasn't backing out now right?...in for a penny. So I reworked the drive a little, took a slightly less scenic route and I feel much better having cut two hours out of the length of our journey~:)

Meanwhile, I've mapped and printed every step of the way, even the interstate through Wyoming, something I've driven countless times and could do in my sleep. By the end of eight days I might be. From our house to each and every hotel. I've purchased tickets to events ahead of time, I've shopped for snacks, I have confirmations printed. I have a small pharmacy in case, well, in case. I have a small list of things I still have to do in order to head out the door but we're pretty excited. Sean looked at all of it and said, "why aren't you this organized when I go on trips with you?" I told him next time I would be. But now that I think about it, all we ever do is go to Montana. I'm heading to seven states for eight days by myself with a twelve year old. I don't want to screw this up.

Periodically Montana gets a little nervous about what it entails, but then he gets sidetracked by all the good fun he has planned. He has, after all, 5 seasons of NCIS. Yes, that's right folks. 5 seasons. When I was little my dad drove us to San Francisco and to this day we remember him muttering, with his daughters in the car, "thirteen HUNDRED miles" with a heavy sigh. Yeah. I have FIVE seasons of NCIS. *sigh*

We expect this to be a long drive~ with a lot of NCIS~ and more than our share of trees (the giant kind you can drive through), ocean, mountains, prairies...all great examples of America. In a perfect world, we'd see the world's biggest frying pan and the world's biggest ball of yarn but man, can life really be THAT good? This is what a road trip is.