Summer Road Trip (Part 1)

My Grandma, known as GG to Milo (which stands for Great Grandma) gave me some wonderful advice when Mark and I first married. "Go on road trips with your family. It doesn't cost much money and the things you will see, the time spent together is the best there is." Great advice GG, thanks!

This summer we have taken her advice and made it even better. We took a road trip to Albuquerque to see Vince and Lynnette, Mark's brother and his beautiful bride. GPS calculates this out to be approx a 6.5 hour drive if you are going just ever so slightly above the speed limit. Add in frequent stops for small boys learning to use the potty. This means about 4 minutes notice that a potty is required. And an even smaller boy who becomes instantly hungry and needs to be nursed every 3 hours or so. This makes it an estimated 9 hour drive. But Mark in his efficiency for stops, got us there in just shy of 8 hours. Way to go Mark!

I was prepared for this drive; I had a backpack for Milo which I filled with crayons, coloring books, golden books, Transfomers (of course) Superman, Spider Man, and a variety of cars. for Finn I bought some small toys and rattles that I could attach to his car seat for visual stimulation. We felt especially sad for him, forced to stare at the back of the car seat for 8 hours, just brutal! Mark packed about 2 dozen mixed CDs to keep us musically entertained and I brought a book for me.

I would like to note that a dear friend and coworker suggested to me, "why don't you just get a portable DVD player for the car and let him watch some movies?" I brought this up to Mark who vetoed this saying, "I never had anything like that when I was younger, I am sure Milo can survive too." Good point Mark, plus it feels like it would be contrary to the original GG advice of a family road trip, if 25% of our family is watching a movie. But more on this later.

And so we were off. Everyone happy and ready for vacation.

One our route from AZ to NM, we passed through Heber to Holbrook and then I-40 straight into Albuquerque. Fun fact here; the Disney/Pixar movie Cars based the scenic portion of "Radiator Springs" on the Holbrook to Gallup area. Mark and I thought we were so clever by making sure to point this out to Milo. He neither cared nor commented. Not to be deterred I took pictures like mad. So frustrating isn't it, when you think you know what your son will like, and it turns out he is more interested in the Happy Meal toy from McDonalds rather than the real life rock formations that inspired his once favorite movie. Now that I type that out, I can kind of see why he just smiled at me with that sweet look and said, "okay Mommy" and then went back to play with cars.

According to Milo the best part of this road trip is that outside of Holbrook there is a series of dinosaurs by the side of the road. Uncle Vince had promised while in NM he was going to take Milo to the dinosaur museum. So in Milo's world this was less of a family vacation but more of a dinosaur excavation. He was so excited to see these giant dinosaurs outside of his window. It only served to confirm that this weekend was going to rule!