July 2005
If you read carefully the "Road Trip Part 1" page, you read that we broke our digital camera in Nashville. Thankfully Schuyler's parents loaned us their camera so we could record the rest of our trip. However, we returned their camera upon returning home, so we haven't been able to capture July. It has been eventful, though, as Schuyler had knee surgery on July 5 to repair the medial meniscus on his left knee. The second week of July Bethany went to sports camp at the church where she has gone to pre-school. We sent her to sports camp so she could experience several different sports in a non-threatening and minimally committing environment. The first picture is of her group. She was able to learn basketball, football, T-ball, volleyball, Frisbee, and her favorite, soccer. We may let her play in a soccer league later this year to see if she enjoys it.
To summarize our trip, it really went as well as one could ask seeing that we were traveling with a 3 and 5 year old. The van worked great. We attempted to limit the amount of travel time each day, and then tried to travel during nap time. You can see that both Bethany and Caroline were able to sleep in their car seats. The van also has a DVD player, and usually the girls watched one DVD each day. If the DVD happened to be particularly annoying (like Barney), we were able to give the girls headphones so Lindsey and Schuyler didn't have to listen along. We mostly had good driving weather, but one day experienced some pretty heavy rain. We managed to survive eating at restaurants. The girls liked eating at Cracker Barrel. Probably the most difficult part of the trip was the hotels. Most of the time Schuyler slept with Bethany and Lindsey slept with Caroline. One night we put Bethany and Caroline together, but during the night Caroline had turned sideways and Bethany vacated the bed for the floor. At the Sheraton Clayton Plaza in St Louis (a priceline.com find) there wasn't a room with two beds available, so Schuyler slept between the two girls in a king bed and Lindsey took the roll away bed.
Some statistics about the trip:
| Total Distance Driven | 3316 miles |
| Total Fuel Used | 163.15 gallons |
| Fuel Economy | 20.33 mpg |
| Total Van Run Time | 62 hours 10 minutes |
| Average Price per Gallon | $2.120 |
| Most States in one day | 4 (PA, WV, OH, IN) |
| Most Miles in a day | 503 (first day, McKinney, TX to Blytheville, AR) |
| Maximum Elevation: | 3167 ft (Flat Top, WV) |
| Minimum Elevation: | 91 ft (Brinkley, AR) |
There were two issues that complicated our adventure... We found that, although St Louis was a great place to visit, we had a really difficult time getting around there. I felt that the roads weren't marked well, and it didn't help that Fair St Louis had several streets closed downtown. The other frustration was the time zone change. It so happened that we were "bit" by time zone anomalies when both coming and going. On the outbound trip we stayed 30 miles west of Harriman, TN, for the wedding. Of course, the time zone change was between the two locations so we had to constantly adjust when going back and forth. When returning home, we planned our trip so we would get our extra hour between Indianapolis and St Louis. However, we found that even though Indianapolis is in the Eastern Time Zone, it doesn't observe daylight savings time. So we ended up leaving Indianapolis an hour later than planned and got to the Bigfoot Shop just as it closed, instead of an hour before it closed. Oh well...