How to make a 2 day trip last 5 days

My Mom, the kids, and I are heading up to Colorado.  We allowed 5 days to get up there, and we got the question, “How do you make it take that long?”  Well, we enjoy the journey, we take the random side trip to see what we can see.  Here’s our first three day’s progress.

 

We stopped twenty miles into our trip and got beef jerky.  Then the boys attempted to convince me we NEEDED to buy as their souvenir of the trip, a rubber band gun rifle. I looked at the price and said, “It’s over your budget,” then they tried to convince me they could go in together, I responded “First, you are not buying your it until we get out of Texas, and second you didn’t actually play with the last rubber band gun you got.”  This ensued lots of promises they would play with it.  Needless to say, we did not leave the store with rubber band guns, we did leave with 2 pounds of beef jerky, candy popcorn, half a pound of sausage, and 2 pouting boys.

We made it about 90 miles before stopping in West, TX to get kolaches.  You need to get kolaches, or so my Mom informed me.  So we did, and found out this one store has raised quite a tidy sum to help the victims of the West explosion.  I was glad to do my part to help.

 

Stopped and had lunch with the paternal grandparents in Dallas, then spent 20 minutes trying to get back onto the interstate due to road construction.  The truck with the Oklahoma license plates was apparently not going back home because he tried to lead us off somewhere else.  Eventually got back on the interstate.

We almost reached the Oklahoma border when I saw a sign for a WW2 memorial, and I HAD to go see that, so we turned around, backtracked to the Texas Welcome Center, and took pictures of it.  I committed the cardinal sin of parenting and woke my sleeping child to get pictures.  She was not happy.

 

Drove for 4 miles after figuring out how to get back on the interstate, stopped at the Oklahoma Welcome Center.  The kids learned all about the stuffed bison there, and were told his name is George.

 

Stopped in Oklahoma City for the night and had dinner with friends.  The kids attempted to half drown themselves in the pool while I recovered from a migraine.

Get up, have a leisurely breakfast, hang out with friends more, then head to a museum at the crack of 12:30.  Spend 3 hours there, and decide to head off for the day.

Decide you don’t want to take the interstate, and start finding other roads.  You know those windy two lane roads that no one travels on, through towns so small they don’t have a stop light. 

 

Nearly drive off the road, when you don’t see it’s turning because you’re looking at the road that’s not actually you’re road, but looks like it is.  Pull over until you can stop laughing at the near accident while your kids ask “Why are you and Mimi laughing?”  Start laughing harder.

Take a picture at the Kansas border.

Stop to take a picture at the cool statue of a horse.  Read and find out it’s in honor of the man who helped found this town and raced to stake his claim along with hundreds of other settlers in Oklahoma and Kansas.  This is only five minutes after the last picture.

 

Drive for an hour looking for a hotel, there are no hotels in small Kansas towns, finally find one in a town of 6,000 people.  They quite kindly tell you where the Wizard of Oz museum you went to as a kid is.  It is three hours the wrong direction.

Set off to said museum.  Stop at a Nature Center and spend 2 hours playing there.  Let your kids play in the mud/sand area just after it’s rained.  Literally, two minutes earlier it was raining.

Drive for another 30 minutes, then decide to stop because it’s raining really hard.  Sure, it’s 4:30 in the afternoon, that just means more swimming time at the hotel.  Swim for a good long time, then play at a playscape after dinner.  Wear your Batman hoodie to dinner because it annoys your Mom………  Or it’s cool.

 

We still have an hour before we get to the Wizard of Oz museum.  Before we leave town, we’re going to a museum that is supposed to have a recreation of a sod house, and a late 19th century pioneer town.  As you can imagine, I’m happy as a clam.

 

Hmph, it didn’t publish this morning, Wizard of Oz museum was a huge hit, as was the Yesteryear Museum where they climbed all over tractors and fire trucks and played in a one room schoolhouse, but my camera is all the way over on the other side of the hotel…….