Three Months On the Road

One of the best things about our current life stage (professor married to stay at home mom of kids who are not yet in school) is that it allows for extensive vacations.  This summer, we are taking full advantage by hitting the road for 3 months.  We are going to drive the crew (our family plus our 2 dogs) to Reno, NV, to spend time with Kenny's family.  After 6 weeks, we are going to drive to Lincoln, NE (which, conveniently, is the halfway point back to VB), and spend a month with my family.  Then, back home.  The trip will involve driving 6,000 miles (about 80 hours of drive time).  As we get ready to go on this drive, I am briefly wondering if we've gone crazy.  We are blessed to have kids and dogs who are amazingly good car travelers, and Kenny's like a machine when it comes to driving.  But it's still a pretty major task to keep everyone fed, bathroomed, rested, and happy while you're in the car all day.

We've done trips kind of like this a couple times before.  The first was our move from Reno to Virginia Beach.  We drove shorter days and had one less kid, but Joshua was in a much more complicated medical stage, which made for some interesting dilemmas.  Some of the things we dealt with on that trip  were:  his oxygen regulator broke in Cheyenne, Wyoming, so we had to track down a nearby Apria to fix the oxygen situation; one of his jaw distractors broke off in Lincoln, when we were 1500 miles away from both his old craniofacial surgeon and his new craniofacial surgeon, so we addressed the situation by emailing pictures to the doctors and getting their advice by phone; and the surgical site got an infection, so we took him to the ER in Lincoln, where the doctor who treated us had never even heard of the surgery that caused the infection.  This trip should not involve any of those kinds of complications.  We did a drive with both kids to and from Nebraska over Christmas (which was 40 total hours of drive time), and that went well, so hopefully this trip will go equally well.

There are many things I'm looking forward to about this summer:

• Spending time with our families and watching all the baby cousins get to know each other (in both cities!).  Meeting my new niece Daphne for the first time.
• Going on some dates with Kenny.  I once told Kenny that the nicest restaurant in Lincoln was Applebees, so it's always fun to prove that statement wrong.
• Reconnecting with friends and visiting our old churches.  
• So You Think You Can Dance will be broadcast this summer and I get to watch it!!
• Giving Joshua a break from his therapies.  It will be interesting to see how it affects him to to be off for 3 months (we usually have speech and feeding therapy each once per week).  It will definitely be nice for me and Zoey to get a break from that routine, and it might give Joshua some rest and renewed energy for when we get back into it.  (This will be the first time in his life, since the NICU, that he's had such an extended break from doctors and therapies, and we're grateful that he's now in a position to take 3 months off.)  
• Introducing Zoey to Lake Tahoe and the giant mining statue in Silver Legacy.  Also, taking Zoey to the Nebraska bookstore so that she can wear a giant corn hat.    
• Getting lots of pictures of it all and posting on Facebook!

We are leaving on Mother's Day, will be in Reno end of May through June, and Nebraska for July.  I will post updates throughout the summer about our travel adventures.  Hope to see many of you along the way!