Ahhhh, back to the blog after a week off in Texas. It was a much-needed change of pace in the country at Lance's parent's. Jared and I were the last ones to join the rest of the gang in the morningg, I had time to take a shower every day, I didn't have to entertain the kids all day every day...and of course the kids got to spend quality time with the grandparents. We decided to split up the 10 1/2 hour trip into two days, so we left on Saturday the 20th, stopped in Little Rock, AR and got to Texas on Sunday. The kids did suprisingly WONDERFUL the entire trip down. I think Ava whined for a total of 30 seconds on the second day. This is mostly thanks to the built in DVD player in the van as we turned Ava around to see the screen, so the two girls couldn't see each other to communicate. The only exception to their wonderfulness was the hotel stay. That was enough to give me a huge headache. We all got to bed at 9:45. We leisurely got up and drove Sunday morning.
During that day's trip we stopped for lunch in Texarkana, about 2 hours from the Clifton's, and a man in his late 20's approaches the van before we close the doors to drive off. Lance was the only one outside the van, but Jared's door was opened. The man didn't look homeless but he was asking for money. He said was staying at the Salvation Army, which has a two free nights then it's $8 a day. Lance offers to get him food, but he says they feed him there. So Lance offers to contact Salvation Army to cover a couple nights instead of giving him money. He was surprised by this gesture, but ended up declining. So we assume that he was strategically located outside the liquor store for a reason, so we didn't give him any money. Well, I felt kind of bad if he ended up sleeping on the street and we could've done something. So we call the Salvation Army, but they didn't know of anyone staying there by the man's name. I have the bright idea to track the place down and leave a donation for someone to stay beyond their free nights, and if that guy showed up great. After about 30 minutes of finding the place, a staffer at Salvation Army kindly told me that they can't accept cash, but this guy that came up to us was probably scamming us. So I head out feeling bad that I couldn't do more, but we tried. THEN, as we're heading off Lance tells me he remembers another part of the conversation. While they were talking in the parking lot the guy takes notice that we're from out of town and asks Lance if he knows who gypsies are. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Lance tell him he does, and the man tells him that's who he's with. First of all, knowing this at the beginning of this goose chase would've deterred me and eased my guilt for not being able to help this guy out. Like I said, he didn't look homeless, but here I am thinking maybe he got evicted, lost his job, something!!! But no, he is willfully out on the street, hitting people up for money. And btw I found out that Salvation Army has 3 free nights and is $6/day after that. Needless to say I was just hoping I would see that guy walking down the street so I could yell at him and sarcastically correct his scam information. Oh well.
Anyway...the kids had a nice trip of fishing, playing with the dogs, running around and playing ball outside, eating out, and hotel fun (for them not us).
We left Friday morning heading for Memphis. Now I didn't have time to book our hotel night, so Lance did it from his parent's house. It wasn't until we were on our way that I realized it was 30 minutes completely out of the way from our route home in south Memphis. On top of that we couldn't find a decent place to eat near the hotel, and ended up getting the kids Wendy's cheeseburgers and milk, and we had some apples with us. It was also a bath night, so the kids didn't have a whole lot of time to run around the room before bed. After Lance made the last trip up from the car he tells me that there's a sign stating a strict "no noise" policy at the hotel. Apparently there is a whole floor reserved for the railway workers, they work all shifts and have this policy in place mainly for them. As you can imagine, any peep from the kids sent me into panic mode thinking we were going to get kicked out with 3 kids at any moment. We also filled Jenna in on this information as we would be "sleeping in the car all night if she keeps yelling and messing with Ava." My panic shifted into high gear at 12 a.m., 2:30 a.m., 5:30 a.m., all times that Jared woke up screaming his head off. I felt conflicted by my sympathy for his gas pains and shrill cries and my desire for him to shut up before we got kicked out on the street in the middle of the night. At these times Ava also woke up crying. By 6:30 a.m. I had probably gotten 3 good hours of sleep and the rest were worthless. Jenna was waking up, Ava was passed out and we left her that way until her and her pack n play were the last things to get out the door. Under normal circumstances we would've taken our time packing up, taking showers, etc., but we HAD to get out of that hotel before I lost my mind! We ate breakfast at the restaurant as quickly as possible with three kids and were off! About 4 1/2 hours to go, not including the stops. The kids did pretty well again, mostly whiny the last couple hours, Ava specifically. We stopped by our friends to get our garage door opener, as they took out our trash cans while we were gone, made a milk, bread and eggs stop at the store and were ALL relieved and happy to be home sweet home.
No comments:
Post a Comment