Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Tuesday and it is my one day in Texas for a while.  Liesl and I slept in this morning being pretty tired.  Dominica and Francesca were up and driving before we got up.  They stayed in the Nashville area last night so have a lot of driving that they need to do yet today.

I spent the day working heavily trying to get caught up a little bit from the bedroom.  I set up a small table there and sat on a folding chair for the day.  Liesl was very excited to have access to her large toy library again and had toys out and spread out all over the upstairs.  She has missed having so many toys.  She was engaged all day playing with them, other than coming in to ask me when we would have a chance to do some sewing together.  She has been asking to get to sew using her sewing kit for a week or more.  She loves getting to do that.

Dominica and Francesca made really good time coming down from Nashville and were doing so well that Liesl and I decided to hold off on getting our dinner from Panda Express, which Liesl had been very excited to get to have again, until they all arrived.

I dropped off Panda Express for Francesca at her house and then took dinner back for the family.

We spent the evening cleaning, packing, prepping and getting to bed as early as possible because we need to be up at three in the morning!  It is going to be really rough tomorrow.

Last night, obviously, I got to sleep with Liesl.  Tonight she slept with Dominica and I slept with Luciana.  This is the last time that I get to spend with the girls for a week and a half.

There was sadly no way to avoid today being another driving day.  This feels like it has been the longest drive to Texas ever.  I have never needed to stop twice before although we have been using Ohio as an extra stop the last few times that we have done the drive back and forth before this.  But, in a way, you could consider Waverly to have been a stop along the way.  Although, on the other hand, that actually made this seem like four days of driving instead of just three!  Talk about a lot of travel.

We got up earlier today and got right onto the road to see how quickly we could make it to Houston.  There was traffic again, as soon as we were on the road in Louisiana.  This did not make me happy.  It took a long time to get across the state.  And boy was it hot.  Mostly in the form of humidity.  It was eight eight degrees and water dripping off of everything when we left the hotel room.  It was ninety four when we eventually got to Texas.

I finished my Simon Winchester book this morning, which was excellent as all of his books have been, and then I moved on to reading “W is for Wasted”, the latest in Sue Grafton’s Alphabet Murders series.

Today’s drive was not too horrible.  But it was pretty long, still.  It was mid-afternoon when we finally got into the Houston area.  Unfortunately because I did not have a house key with me and because there was no one at the house I had to drive quite a bit past League City down to Dickensen to the CVS where Brittany was working to borrow her house key and then drive back up to the house.  So we lost possibly as much as an hour with that extra driving!  Not a good day for that to have happened.

Dominica, Francesca and the kids were on the road out of Frankfort this morning and on their way down too.  They should arrive in Houston tomorrow night.

We got up to the house and to our surprise the house alarm went off.  That wasn’t good!  Good thing I was able to text Brittany and she was able to shut it off from her phone and call the alarm company to tell them that it was a false alarm.

I had to set up my laptop and get to work right away.  I had already missed the morning stand up meeting.  But that was not too big of a deal as we have all been working a ton of hours as of late and everyone knows that I am working like crazy to make it so that I can be out there in San Francisco in two days.

Liesl was super happy to be out of the car and was very excited to get to play with all of her toys again.  Instantly she had the toy closet in her bedroom emptied out and toys spread out all over the house!  She went pretty much crazy.

I ran out to Taco Bell to get dinner for us.  It is cheap, easy, healthy and close and I know that Liesl is looking forward to more of their rice.

We stayed up to visit with Joe and Brittany just a little bit tonight.  Joe did not get home until after midnight so we only saw him for thirty minutes maximum before we needed to get to bed.  At least we are finally here in Texas.  The drive is over.  I now get just one day between all of the driving and needing to fly out to California early Wednesday morning.

It was nearly eleven this morning when Liesl and I were able to check out and meet Gene down in the lobby of the Hampton Inn in Richmond, Kentucky.  And we still did not have nearly enough sleep, but it would have to do.  Because we got in so late last night that means that our day today is that much shorter and we are going to be that much more tired tonight.  This is going to be tough, for sure.

We went to the Golden Corral with Gene, which was right next door to the hotel.  This was perfect for Liesl.  She found lots of stuff on the buffet that she liked including corn, rice and pancakes.  And there was a ton of stuff that she never managed to see at all because she was full before she ever made it to those parts of the buffet.  She also got corn on the cob which was partly funny and partly tragic as she tried to eat it without having any teeth.  Poor little toothless girl.

Gene and I had a good time.  This is the first time that we have met in person even though we have talked to each other for a few years.  We know each other originally from Spiceworks and then more recently from MangoLassi and even more recently because Gene joined NTG.

It was probably one thirty when Liesl and I were back on the highway, Interstate 75, and headed towards Knoxville, Tennessee.

The drive was pretty bad today.  We were in traffic the moment that we got onto the highway in Richmond and we were in traffic for the entire day, it never stopped.  We went down I75 down across Georgia and got the highway to Birmingham and down through Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  By the time that we were in Tuscaloosa, Alabama we were getting hungry and tired so we stopped for a bit and hit the Taco Bell there.  The food and bathroom situation there was good, just like yesterday, but the food took fifteen or twenty minutes to even order which made what we hoped would be a quick stop into something pretty slow.  This was actually our second pit stop of the day as Liesl had had a lot of water with breakfast and needed a bathroom stop at a Pilot Truck Stop pretty early on in the day which was a bit of an adventure as it was not nearly as well set up as the Taco Bells are.

By this point at Taco Bell, still in Alabama, I was pretty sure that we were going to be stopping relatively soon.  I looked for options in Mississippi but was not able to find anything that looked good.  We ended up having to go well into Louisiana before we were able to find something.

Eventually we ended up at the Hampton Inn in Covington, Louisiana but when we got there, even though they had rooms, they were having “technical difficulties” – which I am pretty sure just meant that the overnight auditor was not on the ball and had no idea what he was doing – so we got sent across the street to the Hilton Garden Inn which is an even more upscale Hilton property.  It cost us about ten dollars more, which was mostly a waste considering how little we were going to use the room, but whatever.  The room was excellent and it was not too expensive and we get extra points for extra cost anyway (with this stay we move up from a Blue to a Silver Hilton member too.)

It was two, I think, when we got into the HGI and, again, straight off to sleep.  I was really tired at this point.  There was just no way that I was going to be able to drive on further than we went.  Even getting to Covington was really pushing it.

This morning we all hung out in the hotel, the Hampton Inn in Sayre, Pennsylvania, until around lunch time as we were not sure when we were supposed to head over to the farm for the day.  I think that everyone appreciated getting the extra rest, too.

We hung out on the farm for several hours.  At three I went out to get the car fueled up, bought some drinks and snacks for it, got everything packed up and stopped by the hotel to wash up and relax a little before going back to the farm.  Once back, I got Liesl loaded up and just after five we were on the road.  We are driving together down to Texas tonight while everyone else that is going down to Texas is spending another night in Waverly and Sayre, going back to Frankfort in the morning and then leaving the morning after that to drive down to Texas.  So Liesl and I are doing six hours less total driving than the rest of the family.  But we are doing it with just one driver and no cruise control.  And we have to get down there by Monday morning, which is going to be a challenge but this is the window with which we have to work.

The drive went well.  We started by going down PA 220 to the Interstate 99 corridor which took us all of the way down to the Maryland border area where it switched back to PA 220 again.  It was a bit of a slow drive but very pretty and no traffic.  Liesl was playing with her iPad for the first hour or so.  I noticed in Troy, Pennsylvania that she was asleep in the back seat and was asleep for an hour.

I know that Liesl woke up around the time that we crossed into Maryland.  I remarked to her that we were in Maryland and she said that she thought that it was a very pretty place.  And it was, very pretty in that area for sure.

We turned west and drove into Cumberland, Maryland as it was getting dark.  It was about time for food and a bathroom break and when I saw a Taco Bell I decided that this was a good place to stop as they would have clean, manageable bathrooms as well as good food options before we head into the empty spaces in eastern West Virginia which could make stopping for anything rather difficult for a while.  It was probably a little after eight when we stopped at Taco Bell.

The stop at Taco Bell was perfect.  The bathrooms were clean and private, which was perfect. This is Liesl and my first time dealing with us traveling without Dominica to deal with the bathroom situation and that makes things a little complex.  This made it simple.  That alone made us very happy that we stopped.

Getting food was perfect too.  I got my regular dollar menu items and Liesl got a bowl of rice.  She loves rice.  In fact, she loves it so much that she made me go back and get her a second bowl of rice.  And she loved that so much that she decided to have me get her a third bowl of rice!  She ate all three and was very happy.  She has decided that she loves Taco Bell and can’t wait to eat at the one near Uncle Joe’s house in Houston.

Unfortunately, because Liesl ate so many bowls of rice, when we went outside to get back into the car we discovered that the streets and the parking lot were packed with people who had all been watching the Cumberland fireworks display that had ended no more than thirty seconds before we went outside!  Talk about bad timing.  Liesl did not get to see fireworks because we had to leave Waverly early and now she missed these too.  And on top of that, we were now caught in so much traffic that we lost at least twenty minutes trying to get out of Cumberland is what was now extremely busy traffic.

At least Liesl got to see about a half dozen rockets go up as we drove east towards West Virginia.  It must have been some of the suburbs of Cumberland still doing their own fireworks shows or something that we just caught the tail end of.  It was not very much but Liesl has seen so few fireworks shows that hopefully she does not know what she was missing.  She really enjoyed the few that she managed to see.

It was a very, very long drive after Cumberland.  Liesl was asleep pretty soon after that and I was able to listen to my books via Audible.  I had started reading “The Imperial Cruise” that was about Theodore Roosevelt but the atrocities that he oversaw were so grusesome that even in book form I could not read it around Liesl so had to choose something else to read.  I found Simon Winchester’s book “The Men Who United the States” and started reading that.  Winchester’s books are always excellent.  It kept me away but it was a really long night and really exhausting.

We had originally been hoping to make it to Richmond, Kentucky by two in the morning.  That did not happen at all.  First because we needed to leave at four and actually left just after five.  Also because we had a nearly hour long stop at Taco Bell.  Plus we were just not making great time, it seemed.  The traffic around Cumberland adding to that.

So instead of two in the morning, at which point I was tired but not horrible, it was five in the morning when we finally arrived at the Hampton Inn in Richmond, Kentucky.  I was in really rough shape.

We checked into the hotel and it was straight to bed.  Tomorrow is going to be really rough as even if I slept until noon it would not be a full night’s sleep!  We are supposed to be meeting Gene for breakfast so I dropped him a note to let him know that it would not be an early breakfast and off to sleep I went.

I have the Hilton Honors app on my iPhone now and I am loving it.  It really helps with me being able to look up hotel information like address, getting a map, contact information, making a booking or whatever.

I have today as a holiday at work and we got super lucky that there was no major issue today, which is really something considering we have barely had a quiet day without a disaster in close to a month, so the fact that today was scheduled to be a holiday and we actually were able to take it as one was right on the verge of being a miracle.

As it is a day off we do not need to jump out of bed and get moving super early today, which was great.  We got to sleep in and rest and relax.  But as soon as we were reasonably up we were getting onto the road to head down to Sayre, Pennsylvania for the holiday.  I am driving Liesl in the Chevy Spark while everyone else comes down in the GMC Acadia.  It was late morning when we got onto the road.  Dominica’s parents were out first in their Subaru at least fifteen minutes before the rest of us.  Francesca, Dominica and the rest of the kids were ahead of Liesl and me by a couple minutes but by the time that we got to Utica we saw them in the McDonald’s drive-thru as we went directly to the highway so we were already a few minutes ahead of them at that point.

Before I got off the Thruway in Syracuse to get onto Interstate 481 south I had already passed Dominica’s parents.  Liesl and I made good time all the way down to Sayre.  It was an easy drive.  This is, I am pretty sure, the first time that Liesl and I have traveled alone so far.  This was quite a long trip for just the two of us.

Everyone else went directly to Dominica’s aunt’s house in Waverly but Liesl and I went directly to the Hampton Inn, which is right down the street from Dominica’s aunt’s house, and checked in and made sure that everything was set with the rooms.  Our family has one room and Francesca’s has another just down the hall on the second floor.  Liesl climbed right up on the king bed when we got there with her iPad and chilled for a bit.  I had skipped taking a shower this morning figuring that I would take one here so I took the opportunity to take a nice, long, relaxing shower.  Boy have I missed high end American showers – that is one thing that we do so much better in the US than in Europe.

By the time that I was out of the shower Liesl was fast asleep, rolled up and completed encased in the top blanket.  She was so adorable all hidden away.  It took a bit of work to wake her up and convince her to go down to the car so that we could go join everyone up the street in Waverly.

As soon as I arrived at the house, everyone was getting into cars to take the kids into Elmira to some municipal park there that has a huge slide that the kids really love.  So I drove Liesl there and we all had a great time.  Had to be there for an hour or more.  This was the fastest slide in a playground that I have ever seen.  To make it even faster they were using wax paper to speed people up.  The slide was so fast that most of the kids, including Madeline and Emily, would shoot right off of the bottom of it.  I had to catch a lot of kids coming down before they ate grass (or mud) at the bottom.  Liesl loved the slide and did it a lot, maybe more than anyone, but she did not do it super fast and never needed to be caught at the bottom.  Luciana kept thinking that she wanted to do it and would climb up to the top but would only come down the slide if one of her bigger cousins, mostly Alex, would hold her on their laps when they did it.

We got back from the playground and it was time for everyone to change and get over to the country club or golf course right around the corner as we were doing a big family dinner there.

While we were at dinner, Liesl bit into a roll and lost yet another tooth!  This time it was her fifth one out in about five weeks.  Her front teeth are already all gone.  She is losing teeth farther back.  She has like no teeth left with which to eat anything.  But she has caught up to Garrett now!

It was getting dark when we got back the house.  We visited for a while but were kicked out early as the older generation wanted to get to bed.  So Diane went and picked up some beer that we brought back to the Hampton and she, Dominica, Francesca and I drink in our hotel room until late at night.  Diane had quite a time show us her collection of Helium Booth video that now Dominica and Francesca are addicted to making as well.

All of the kids ended up staying up quite late as well.  They are going to be really tired tomorrow.