Hittin' the road... or skies.

Road trips suck.

(Unless you’re 17 or 18 and young and dumb and with a bunch of girlfriends getting crazy and listening to Journey and Prince and The English Beat REALLY LOUD and contemplating what to do with your lives and are actually excited about your final destination… Not that I’ve ever done that…)

I’m good for 3-4 hours TOPS and then I start to lose my mind. This, however, has not stopped us from planning a road trip to Miami for the holidays.

Which is a 10-11 hour drive from our house.

I can already feel the crazy creeping up…

I created an “Adventure List” with all that we’ll need to survive the journey and the subsequent 5-day stay at DD’s brother’s family house. I got all set and organized.

I decided to embrace the road trip.

Then yesterday Danger Dad announced that he’d found some fantastic airline rates and we may be flying to Miami instead of driving!

(YAHOOOO! HOLY COW! FABULOUS! YAY! YES! YES! YES!)

I hesitate to get my hopes up but I am totally stoked at the possibilities. As long as we plan to take it slow and not get caught up in the holiday airport crush it might actually be fun. The kids would be so curious about the security line (all those people in uniform!), the subway train to the terminal, the boarding process, the take-off and landing… And it’s only a two-hour flight. Nice.

S & J frequently talk about going on an airplane ride, especially since we’ve had many visitors that have taken planes to see us and I’ve lately traveled to SF for work via airplane. (Of course.) We live just 15 miles or so from the airport and I’ve taken them to meet friends that are on layovers, plus our neighborhood is sometimes is in the flight path so we can see lots of planes in the sky on a clear day. They love airplanes.

They don’t like the car so much.

They’ve never really traveled more than 2 hours in the car. And it always gets somewhat painful although I know they are doing their best. Let’s face it: Car travel can boring. And when you’re 2 ½ it can be really, really boring despite all the fun music and games and books and distractions. Who wants to be belted down? Confined, feet hanging down, sitting straight up? Not ideal positioning. I lobbied to rent an RV when we first started entertaining the idea of a Miami road trip. I figured then at least the kiddos could lie down, run around, etc. and it wouldn’t be quite so unbearable. A traveling party! Yay! But RV rentals are expensive (wow, are they expensive, even the smaller ones) so we crossed that option off the list and decided to bite the bullet. Our mini-van is quite nice and comfortable and God knows our parents made us do road trips in far less style so we could definitely survive.

But now I have visions of air travel in my head. I wonder if I can even consider a road trip now.

Think I’ll go blast some Journey to get in the mood... Just in case…