Our NOT-SO-GREAT travel plans!

This year we decided to get a head start on our way to Illinois for Thanksgiving and we left right after Ryan got home from work on Tuesday night. Our plan was to let the kids fall asleep in the car and drive at least five hours. That plan did not work. Here's how our night went:

6:15pm Left our house

6:40pm Christian asks if we're there yet :)

7:00pm We head over our first mountain and see black ice on the road

7:15pm The first snow flakes begin to fall

7:45pm The roads are starting to get bad

8:00pm It's like a blizzard outside. Traffic creeping. No visibility

8:15pm We realize that we've got to stop

So we only made it two hours the first night, leaving us 11 more hours to cover the next day :( We were still in Pennsylvania. We should have just stayed home and left the next morning!)

When we woke up in the morning there was 8-10inches on the ground. I took this picture from the hotel window of Ryan cleaning off our car.

Thankfully Christian is great in the car. He easily entertains himself. See the snow out the car window?

McKenna really did great too, although you have to be pretty involved with her. I was sitting in the backseat for most of the trip to Illinois and we played endless games of peek-a-boo. One DVD player is a bit of a problem when one child is facing forward and one child is facing backward, so believe it or not, McKenna got to watch the most TV. Christian had other stuff to entertain himself with!

We arrived in Illinois at 10:00pm on Wednesday night!

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Do you even want to hear about our trip home? Probably not! It was by far the worst trip of my life. Seriously, the worst. We left Illinois at 5pm on Saturday night and our plan was to drive all the way home through the night. We've done it before and traffic is horrible on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, so we were going to go for it! Once again, that plan quickly fell apart.

About two hours into the drive I started feeling bad. I thought that maybe I was just carsick from sitting in the back, so Ryan switched with me and I drove for awhile. Unfortunately, I had to stop about a half an hour later to get sick on the side of the road. This happened multiple times over the next three hours until I finally couldn't take it anymore. We got a hotel suite when we were almost to Ohio and I got the bedroom with the king sized bed all to myself because it was closest to the bathroom. I spent the entire night throwing up. Ryan and Christian slept on the pull out couch in the other room. I felt so bad that I had the comfy room, but they didn't seem to notice. They slept through the night, unlike me. Was it a stomach bug? Flu? Food poisoning? I have no idea. I just know it was terrible. I hardly slept all night and we had to hit the road the next morning because we had to get home because of the trial on Monday morning. I didn't want to sit in the back with the kids because we didn't want them to catch what I had, so I had to drive. And the trip home took almost 11 more hours.

This is McKenna on the last leg of the trip. She was over it by this point and her mommy and daddy were discussing flight plans for next years Thanksgiving trip.

Christian with his new binoculars from Cracker Barrel. They have a light on them, so they were perfect for nighttime driving!

When we pulled in the driveway Grandmom was already at our house. She had the thermostat turned back up, the dishwasher emptied and laundry going. What a relief to be home even if it was just for a few hours of sleep before hitting the road again for the trip to MD.

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So the bottom line is that our travel time was pretty rough! Thankfully we had a wonderful Thanksgiving! The Thanksgiving part was GREAT!! Christian cried his eyes out when we had to leave. He did not want to go home. We had such special time with all the Chattertons and were so blessed that so many of them took off work and drove out of their way to have special time with us! I have so fabulous pictures to share and wonderful stories! I'll get to it, but right now I'm heading to bed. Ahhh...to sleep in my own bed!