The Drive to Texas

After 2100+ miles, 10 days, 9 nights, 4 different hotels, 2 families and 1 cute new baby yesterday we returned home from our awesome vacation to Texas.  I don't think we could have had a better trip.  Maybe a few tweaks to the weather but even that was pretty darn good. To summarize it I'm going to divide my blog into 3 or 4 posts so here is the first one.

Thursday, April 25th:
We started off our journey at 2:50 in the morning on Thursday, April 25th.  We woke the kids up and tossed them in the car in hopes that they would fall right back to sleep and give us a few hours of driving before having to entertain them.  In the end it took them until 4:30 to fall back to sleep but they just sat there staring at us like we were crazy and wondering what was going on.  So it wasn't bad that they were awake just kind of weird/creepy.  Then they slept about 2 hours for us before waking up.  After they woke up we put a few more miles on the road and stopped for breakfast at McDonald's.

After a quick breakfast we were back on the road with 4 of our 9.5 hours planned for that day under our belts.  That felt really good!  The kids were great and gave us another 3 hours before having to stop for lunch in Little Rock, Arkansas.  We ate at Cracker Barrel and then stopped at a nearby park to play for an hour before getting in the car again.  At this point we had only 2.5 hours left and were feeling great.  Caleb slept for the last leg and Grace played quietly in her seat.

We arrived at our hotel in Texarkana, TX late afternoon and were able to enjoy our hotel room for a bit before dinner.  There was a McAllisters across the street from the hotel so we walked there and enjoyed eating outside.  By this point we were pretty wiped from missing sleep the night before so we all got a great night of sleep.

Friday, April 26th:
Friday morning we woke up refreshed and ready to hit the road.  We had a very easy 5.5 hour drive through Texas to our first destination of College Station where Matt's sister and her husband live.  So we split it exactly in half and stopped at Chick-Fil-A for lunch.  Matt and I determined neither of us had been to one before (although I have had their food catered) and we really liked it.

We got to College Station by 3:00 and were able to take the kids for a swim in the hotel pool before heading over to Rachel and Rollin's for dinner.  Rachel made us a yummy dinner and it was nice to not eat out.  We enjoyed spending the evening with them and had a great rest of the weekend with them too.  That will be my next post!

Caleb is getting ready to eat his first of many chicken nuggets and fries meals.

Lovely hair Grace:)

Enjoying the park.

I loved this park!  Shade covering, made for young kids, so perfect!

DVD players were the main reason our kids traveled so well:)