The Dreaded Drive

I slept terribly at Mom's, partly because I was hungry and partly because Kimball got up a few times. Oh well. Mom made us a delicious breakfast, Kimball jumped on the trampoline one last time, and we were on the road at 10:30 ish. It was hard to say goodbye to mom and choke back tears. She's the best. I feel bad for everyone that doesn't have her as a mom.

A normal drive from Twin Falls to Spokane is 8.5-9 hours. We stopped twice for food - lunch and dinner and so Kimball could play and use up some energy - and with me following the truck that doesn't go over 65 mph, take into consideration some road construction and winding around mountains....it took us 13.5 hours to get there.

(Side note: for our meals we just got fast food to stay within budget and looked for places that had toys for Kimball to play on. I've never seen a more complex toy set up than the one at Carl's Jr. in Oregon! I had to climb in and help Kimball for a little bit but I never found the top of that play thing and never did find the slide. It was unbelievably complex! When we were ready to hit the road again I made Lance climb in there to retrieve Kimball and it even took him 15 minutes just to get out).

Both Grandma's are wonderful! They each gave us some snacks for the road and Mom bought Kimball a few new toys for the car that would keep him occupied. I was mostly worried about Kimball being strapped into his car seat for that long! But he did SO much better than expected! He took a nap before and after lunch. After we stopped for dinner, we switched him over to ride with Lance just to give him a change of scenery and to give me a break. I was drop dead tired at this point so I cranked up the radio and blasted the air conditioning to keep myself awake for the last 2 hours we needed to drive. Kimball fell asleep in the truck when the sun went down and after having gained an hour because of the time change, we pulled into the hotel in Spokane around 11-11:30pm.

As a recap: the drive was quite boring with nothing much to look at. Even Oregon was brown and dry but we did eventually see some green forest through the winding mountains. Kimball was such a trooper and did awesome! I couldn't have asked for him to do better on such a long drive, I'm still in shock at how well he did. He did so much better than me!