We got back from South Carolina New Year's Day. We woke up early, like 5:30 a.m. early, and drove the seven hours (nine since we have kids) to DC. There wasn't much traffic (unsurprisingly not many people were out and about the morning of January 1), and since it was Sunday, we still got that vacation "buffer day" for the observed holiday on Monday. It worked out quite nicely -- quite nicely indeed. Y'know, other than the fact we spent half our waking hours Sunday in a car. When are teleporters going to become real things?
Lil' S1 put up a bit of a struggle when it was time to go. We woke him up from a deep sleep, and he went to bed late the night before (he had trouble falling asleep because of the "lightning," i.e, New Year's Eve fireworks), and he got it in his head somehow that we were getting a puppy before going home. So our conversation when I woke him up went something like this:
Me [gently shaking him awake]: Hey buddy, time to wake up. We're going home!
Him: What?! In the night time?!
Me: It's not night. It's the morning. The sun just hasn't come up yet.
Him: Did you get my puppy?
Me: No, we aren't getting one.
Him [in tears]: I want a puppy!!!
Me: If you hurry up and get ready, you can watch Rescue Bots on the iPad in the car.
Him [immediately stops crying]: Okay, Daddy. Can I watch the one where Dr. Morocco has a shark submarine?
Me: Uh... sure
And that was the end of that potential tantrum.
But it's been rough since we got back, truth be told. Everybody is sick and both kids have been whining incessantly. They got spoiled big time at S's parents' place, and it's been hard to get them back into their usual routines. After being lavished with gifts and attention for two weeks, they are loath to wake up and go back to their non-holiday lives. And we don't want to be too strict with them (S more so than me) because they are both sick. It's probably just common colds, but S thinks Lil' S2 might have croup. Either way they legitimately aren't feeling well, so we're trying to walk that impossible line of simultaneously being comforting and stern.
Anyway...
The trip was good -- way too much driving though. All told we drove from DC to Florida and back. S has a cousin in Jacksonville, so we all went to visit them for a few days after Christmas. I did all but a few of the 25 or so total hours of driving, which is fine -- I'd typically rather be the driver than a passenger, if only because the driver usually gets a comfortable seat. (The car was always jam-packed with people and car seats and luggage and God knows what else.) While driving, I noticed a new type of annoying driver. Everybody knows the left-lane-hugger -- the driver who gets in the fast lane and then drives ten mph slower than everybody else, so that a buildup of cars, to which said driver is utterly oblivious (or worse, just doesn't care about), quickly accumulates behind him or her. But I came across the much rarer counterpart of this terrible person -- the right-lane-hugger. I watched a man drive at least twenty miles, not particularly slowly, mind you, without moving from the right lane.
What made this so noteworthy is that traffic was very light, there were two other open lanes, and there were frequent mergers on the right. So this guy would be cruising along, and then he would get to a spot where other cars had to merge into his lane, and instead of moving to the center lane, making life easier and safer on everybody (himself included), he made all the merging cars fit in around him. I understand this in heavy traffic when it's difficult to change lanes, or if there are only two lanes, and you don't want to block the left lane, but that wasn't the case. There was a wide-open center lane. Why not use it, and let the other cars merge with ease? At one point there was a police officer who was out of his car attending to somebody on the side of the road. The shoulder was not very wide, so I thought to myself, "Surely, now he will move over." Nope; he didn't. Instead of moving over to the completely empty area one lane to his left, he whizzed right by, 60 mph, leaving only about a five-foot gap between his 3,000-pound missile and an exposed police officer. So dangerous, and so weird. Not as weird as that car who drove across Maine with one tire on the shoulder of the road the entire time, but weird nonetheless.
Anyway...
S's cousin's was good. The accommodations were a bit cramped, though. There were 11 people staying in a one-story house with two beds. I got one of them, but it was a little kid's twin bed (with princess sheets), and it was not comfortable at all. It felt like a spring was poking my kidney all night. I never got a good night's sleep while I was there. But, I gotta say, I like tropical Christmas. You can have your Norman Rockwell, rustic, white Christmas, if you want it; I'll take the warm weather. I would much rather be able to go outside in a t-shirt and shorts than be able to curl up by the fire with hot cocoa. I don't even like cocoa. It's too sweet.
While in Jacksonville we went to St. Augustine, the self-proclaimed oldest city in the U.S., and it was really cool. There are all sorts of shops offering various forms of gimcrackery, but I just liked the vibe. The city was lit up with a light festival, everybody was happy, and the kids could just run wild with their toy light-sabers S's cousin bought them from a street vendor at the beginning of our visit. (He and his wife have two daughters -- ages 11 and 7 or thereabouts.) Also, we ate at a really good pizzeria. It was just fun all around.
Getting there, however, was not fun -- not at all. It was SO crowded. I was not prepared for the onslaught of traffic and crowds that came with our trip. S's cousin and his family (and S's sister) all went in one car, and I drove S, her parents, and our boys in another car, and I don't know if S's cousin didn't know how crowded it would be, or if he just didn't communicate it S, or if she didn't properly relay it to me. But I was expecting a leisurely trip to a city with ample parking and space, and that is not what I got. Our instructions were to park at the fort in the middle of the city. But unfortunately S put the wrong fort into the GPS, and we went several miles in the wrong direction before noticing our error. Then when we turned around and got close to where we were supposed to go, we got slammed with traffic -- both cars and pedestrians. It was like the traffic at a stadium after a major sporting event ends.
To make matters much worse, we still didn't know exactly where we were going. We didn't have a precise location of the fort, and it was the type of thing where if you make a wrong turn you lose 15 minutes, because that's how long it's going to take you to navigate back to the right path. Eventually, we found parking somewhere else, but we were over a mile from where we needed to be, and we didn't have a stroller, and S's mom has bad knees. So we had to get back in the car, get back in the traffic, and find that damn fort.
Finally, I told S to tell somebody in her cousin's party to send us a pin-drop of the fort's location, which she did, and so we got an actual (correct) location we could put into the GPS. It was less than a mile away, but it took us over a half hour to get there and park and meet up with everybody else. The thing is, I thought of the idea for them to send us a pin-drop when we first realized how bad the traffic was, but I didn't say anything, because S absolutely hates it when she ends up as the middle-person in a conversation between me and her family, and everybody was already extremely irritated, and I didn't want to inflame things, so I just kept my mouth shut. I told S this later, and she responded, "What?! I wish you would have said that! You could have saved us all a lot of headache!" Oops. Oh well, like I said, it was awesome once we got there, so... all's well that end's well, I suppose.
Speaking of ending, it's about time to wrap up this post. I wanted to talk about Rogue One, because I saw it over the holiday and quite liked it, but I think it will have to wait until another time (or more likely I just won't ever write about it all). I'll just say one thing about it (warning: contains a veiled spoiler). Given the events of the final twenty minutes of the movie, I completely understand why Darth Vader didn't believe Princess Leia at the beginning of A New Hope when she told him her spaceship was on a diplomatic mission.
Until next time...
Lil' S1 put up a bit of a struggle when it was time to go. We woke him up from a deep sleep, and he went to bed late the night before (he had trouble falling asleep because of the "lightning," i.e, New Year's Eve fireworks), and he got it in his head somehow that we were getting a puppy before going home. So our conversation when I woke him up went something like this:
Me [gently shaking him awake]: Hey buddy, time to wake up. We're going home!
Him: What?! In the night time?!
Me: It's not night. It's the morning. The sun just hasn't come up yet.
Him: Did you get my puppy?
Me: No, we aren't getting one.
Him [in tears]: I want a puppy!!!
Me: If you hurry up and get ready, you can watch Rescue Bots on the iPad in the car.
Him [immediately stops crying]: Okay, Daddy. Can I watch the one where Dr. Morocco has a shark submarine?
Me: Uh... sure
And that was the end of that potential tantrum.
[We watched the ball drop in the EdVenture Museum in Columbia, South Carolina. It fell at noon and the kids toasted juice boxes.]
But it's been rough since we got back, truth be told. Everybody is sick and both kids have been whining incessantly. They got spoiled big time at S's parents' place, and it's been hard to get them back into their usual routines. After being lavished with gifts and attention for two weeks, they are loath to wake up and go back to their non-holiday lives. And we don't want to be too strict with them (S more so than me) because they are both sick. It's probably just common colds, but S thinks Lil' S2 might have croup. Either way they legitimately aren't feeling well, so we're trying to walk that impossible line of simultaneously being comforting and stern.
Anyway...
The trip was good -- way too much driving though. All told we drove from DC to Florida and back. S has a cousin in Jacksonville, so we all went to visit them for a few days after Christmas. I did all but a few of the 25 or so total hours of driving, which is fine -- I'd typically rather be the driver than a passenger, if only because the driver usually gets a comfortable seat. (The car was always jam-packed with people and car seats and luggage and God knows what else.) While driving, I noticed a new type of annoying driver. Everybody knows the left-lane-hugger -- the driver who gets in the fast lane and then drives ten mph slower than everybody else, so that a buildup of cars, to which said driver is utterly oblivious (or worse, just doesn't care about), quickly accumulates behind him or her. But I came across the much rarer counterpart of this terrible person -- the right-lane-hugger. I watched a man drive at least twenty miles, not particularly slowly, mind you, without moving from the right lane.
What made this so noteworthy is that traffic was very light, there were two other open lanes, and there were frequent mergers on the right. So this guy would be cruising along, and then he would get to a spot where other cars had to merge into his lane, and instead of moving to the center lane, making life easier and safer on everybody (himself included), he made all the merging cars fit in around him. I understand this in heavy traffic when it's difficult to change lanes, or if there are only two lanes, and you don't want to block the left lane, but that wasn't the case. There was a wide-open center lane. Why not use it, and let the other cars merge with ease? At one point there was a police officer who was out of his car attending to somebody on the side of the road. The shoulder was not very wide, so I thought to myself, "Surely, now he will move over." Nope; he didn't. Instead of moving over to the completely empty area one lane to his left, he whizzed right by, 60 mph, leaving only about a five-foot gap between his 3,000-pound missile and an exposed police officer. So dangerous, and so weird. Not as weird as that car who drove across Maine with one tire on the shoulder of the road the entire time, but weird nonetheless.
[St. Augustine, Florida]
Anyway...
S's cousin's was good. The accommodations were a bit cramped, though. There were 11 people staying in a one-story house with two beds. I got one of them, but it was a little kid's twin bed (with princess sheets), and it was not comfortable at all. It felt like a spring was poking my kidney all night. I never got a good night's sleep while I was there. But, I gotta say, I like tropical Christmas. You can have your Norman Rockwell, rustic, white Christmas, if you want it; I'll take the warm weather. I would much rather be able to go outside in a t-shirt and shorts than be able to curl up by the fire with hot cocoa. I don't even like cocoa. It's too sweet.
While in Jacksonville we went to St. Augustine, the self-proclaimed oldest city in the U.S., and it was really cool. There are all sorts of shops offering various forms of gimcrackery, but I just liked the vibe. The city was lit up with a light festival, everybody was happy, and the kids could just run wild with their toy light-sabers S's cousin bought them from a street vendor at the beginning of our visit. (He and his wife have two daughters -- ages 11 and 7 or thereabouts.) Also, we ate at a really good pizzeria. It was just fun all around.
Getting there, however, was not fun -- not at all. It was SO crowded. I was not prepared for the onslaught of traffic and crowds that came with our trip. S's cousin and his family (and S's sister) all went in one car, and I drove S, her parents, and our boys in another car, and I don't know if S's cousin didn't know how crowded it would be, or if he just didn't communicate it S, or if she didn't properly relay it to me. But I was expecting a leisurely trip to a city with ample parking and space, and that is not what I got. Our instructions were to park at the fort in the middle of the city. But unfortunately S put the wrong fort into the GPS, and we went several miles in the wrong direction before noticing our error. Then when we turned around and got close to where we were supposed to go, we got slammed with traffic -- both cars and pedestrians. It was like the traffic at a stadium after a major sporting event ends.
To make matters much worse, we still didn't know exactly where we were going. We didn't have a precise location of the fort, and it was the type of thing where if you make a wrong turn you lose 15 minutes, because that's how long it's going to take you to navigate back to the right path. Eventually, we found parking somewhere else, but we were over a mile from where we needed to be, and we didn't have a stroller, and S's mom has bad knees. So we had to get back in the car, get back in the traffic, and find that damn fort.
Finally, I told S to tell somebody in her cousin's party to send us a pin-drop of the fort's location, which she did, and so we got an actual (correct) location we could put into the GPS. It was less than a mile away, but it took us over a half hour to get there and park and meet up with everybody else. The thing is, I thought of the idea for them to send us a pin-drop when we first realized how bad the traffic was, but I didn't say anything, because S absolutely hates it when she ends up as the middle-person in a conversation between me and her family, and everybody was already extremely irritated, and I didn't want to inflame things, so I just kept my mouth shut. I told S this later, and she responded, "What?! I wish you would have said that! You could have saved us all a lot of headache!" Oops. Oh well, like I said, it was awesome once we got there, so... all's well that end's well, I suppose.
Speaking of ending, it's about time to wrap up this post. I wanted to talk about Rogue One, because I saw it over the holiday and quite liked it, but I think it will have to wait until another time (or more likely I just won't ever write about it all). I'll just say one thing about it (warning: contains a veiled spoiler). Given the events of the final twenty minutes of the movie, I completely understand why Darth Vader didn't believe Princess Leia at the beginning of A New Hope when she told him her spaceship was on a diplomatic mission.
Until next time...
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