Sheep Guarding Llama

Another driving day.  Not so far to go today, though, only about eight hours of car time.  We slept in nice and late this morning.  By the morning it was Liesl and I sleeping in the “pink” room and Dominica and Luciana sleeping in the “diamond” room.

Dominica was up first and I was not too far behind her.  Probably around nine.  We spent the morning in the kitchen hanging out with Aunt Marlene.  The girls got up, first Luciana around nine thirty and then Liesl at more like eleven.

We stayed at Aunt Marlene’s house until about one.  It was bright and sunny but still extremely cold and we had little desire to get out and onto the road.  We were avoiding the cold for as long as we could but by one we really had to be in the car and underway.

We stopped in Louisville at the grocery store for fortified meals for the kids (generic Pediasure) and then ran across the street to Taco Bell for cheesy rice and bean burritos for Dominica and me.

And then we were on the road. Less than eight hours of highway time to do today.

The drive went fine.  We managed to avoid all of the bad weather today. No snow, no rain and only moderate winds for the entire drive from Louisville, Ohio to Peekskill, New York.  Both of the girls slept a lot of the way too.  They really did well.

Dominica and I completed Eragon and started reading Eldest which Dominica read in print long ago but I have never read at all.

It was around nine thirty when we got to the Peekskill house where we no longer live.  The house was surprisingly holding sixty degrees when we arrived even though the thermostat was set down to fifty four!  Even with no one home and nothing running it held the temperature fifty degrees above the outside temperatures!  That new insulation that we paid for this summer really paid off!!

Dominica managed to make the entire trip without having to so much as move the car in a parking lot.

We did nothing this evening.  Just got into the house, got the kids ready for bed.  It was a short evening.

We are very thankful today that we decided to push on to the north side of Columbus, Ohio last night.  We were able to sleep in until nine this morning and get a relaxing start.  The Comfort Inn that we stayed at was great and very cheap.  A good decision all around.  We got a good night’s sleep and are feeling good today.  And we only have to drive about two hours or maybe a little more but less than three to get to my aunt’s house in Louisville, Ohio where we are going to be hanging out all day and staying tonight.

It is bitterly cold in Ohio today.  It was nine degrees when we got onto the road.  Dominica and I listened to some more of Eragon on our drive.  The drive was smooth until we got to Massillon where we ran into a lot of snow and nearly blinding conditions.  It was a slow go from there to East Canton. We were doing only twenty five miles per hour.

It was around one when we arrived at Aunt Marlene’s house.  This was my first time having driven there all on my own, which is pretty surprising as we go there all of the time and she has been living in the same house for about twenty years!  Grandma was already there.  It was just the six of us (Aunt Marlene, grandma, Dominica, Liesl, Luciana and me) for a while.  Uncle Don came home early and was there around three.  Eventually my cousins all came over (Gwen and Mike, Brett and Molly and eventually Monica and Joe.)  Aunt Cheryl and Aunt Gayle came too.  It was a full house.  We all got pizza for dinner and hung out until around midnight.  The girls had a great time playing with everyone.

We had a really nice time getting to visit with everyone and having enough time to really get to visit and not just popping in quickly, saying “hi” and leaving again.  Spending two nights in Ohio plus getting some sleep, not needing to deal with interviews and everyone having a few days warning on the visit helped a lot.

We spent the night there like we did a year ago.  The upstairs sitting room has been completed since the last time that we were there.  The girls had a great time playing upstairs and naming all of the rooms.  The new sitting room is called the “Fall Room”.  And the bedrooms are the “Pink Flower” room and the “Diamond” room.

Getting the girls off to bed was quite a chore tonight.  First of all the time change back to the east coast is causing no end of issues.  Their schedules are all messed up.  And then all of the naps in the car have made them wide awake late at night too.  We were struggling to get them into bed by one tonight and they were mostly not asleep until three in the morning!

We started off with Liesl and Luciana in the diamond (full size bed) room and Dominica and I in the pink flower room (queen bed.)  But Liesl was having a bit of a temper about having to go to bed and ended up losing access to the iPad for the night.  Luciana had to be moved to the fall room (upstairs sitting room) while we dealt with that.  Then they got put to bed but after a while Luciana came to our room and said that Liesl was so loud that she could not sleep.  So it was the three of us for a while.

Liesl sneaked in and did not fit in the bed so tried sleeping on top of my diagonally which kind of worked.  Eventually, somehow, Dominica and Luciana wound up in the diamond room and Liesl and I wound up in the pink flower room.  I think that Dominica was in the other room by herself for a while, if I remember correctly.   We lost quite a bit of sleep during that whole mess.  The only reason that I ended up staying put at all is because the CPAP more or less anchors me to a single location with some major effort.  Everyone else can move around pretty freely.

There is not much to tell about today.  We got up this morning at the Comfort Suites in Louisiana and were on the road by around nine.  We were very glad that we got a head start last night because even though it was not all that much driving yesterday it really takes a good chunk off of the day today.  We have so much asphalt already behind us before starting out on our very long day.

The weather was gorgeous.  It was bright, clear and in the low sixties along the Gulf of Mexico this morning.  We were really surprised.  What a nice day.

About fifteen hours of driving for us today.  We were on the road and the girls did really great.  It was a really beautiful day and, for my first time ever, I got to drive through Louisiana in the daylight!  After all of these years this was my first time to ever get to see the state when it was not the middle of the night.  Hard to believe.

The whole day went very well.  The girls slept a lot and complained very little.  I did all of the driving, Dominica did none, again.  This is her second trip in which she has had to do no driving at all.

We listened to most of the rest of Eragon today.

We pushed on until well after midnight knowing that we really wanted to be north of Columbus before calling it a night.  We made it there without a problem and got a good rate on a Comfort Inn there and got to bed.

Today Francesca is back at work but the kids are home.  We stayed at Joe and Brittany’s house for most of the day.  I set up in the kitchen so that I could work.  Dominica spent most of the day packing.  We have to be on the road early in the morning so that we can get all of the way to my family in Ohio so that we can spend Wednesday with them.  Liesl and Luciana spent most of the day just quietly playing on their own.  They are not used to all of the time with the other kids and while they love it they are in serious need of quiet downtime after seeing them.

It was a lot of work for Dominica today.  We have a lot of stuff to get ready to either be stored at Joe’s or to go with us.  She had a busy day.  I was pretty productive too and got another article submitted today.

This afternoon, around four, the four of us went over to the Grices’ and spent the evening there.  On our way there Dominica, Liesl, Luciana and I went to Waffle House and got dinner as everyone over there was eating on their own.

We did not stay long tonight, maybe until eight at the latest.  All of the kids have school tomorrow so we could not keep them up.  We were back to Joe’s house before nine.

We had been thinking that we would get the kids to bed early and that Dominica and I would watch a movie in the theatre tonight.  But once we were at the house I said that it was early enough and we were really just killing time until we were going to be ready to leave in the morning that maybe we should just get in the car and get a start on our trip.  Dominica agreed that that made good sense.  So we packed the Acadia up as quickly as we could and just before ten central time we were on the road.

The girls did well and went to sleep pretty quickly.  Dominica and I listened to more of Eragon which we had been reading on the drive southward a few weeks ago.

We did not go super far tonight and that was not our goal.  We just wanted to drive during the time that we would have otherwise been killing time this evening.  We drove until just after two so we got over four hours of driving completed and were in central Louisiana along the Gulf Coast when we stopped for the night.  We found a Comfort Suites on Route 10 for just ninety dollars.  This week is Choice Hotel’s triple points week so we are getting a lot of value out of our stays on this drive.

The hotel was very nice and we were very happy that we stopped.  Not too expensive and very comfortable.  And now we know that tomorrow will not be all that bad.  We get to get a really good night’s sleep tonight.  Luciana got to snuggle with me tonight and Liesl snuggled with Dominica.  Tomorrow night we will switch.

Dominica got up this morning and went shopping with Francesca and then went over to her house.  I stayed at Joe and Brittany’s with the girls as well as with Clara and Emily until around noon when Francesca came over and picked them up and took them back over to her house.  I stayed at Joe’s house so that I could do some catching up on work as I have had very little time to work on anything for the past three days or so and am feeling like I am a bit behind.

It was a very quiet day for me.  I sat in the kitchen working at the kitchen island for the whole day.  I got a lot of posting done both on Spiceworks and on MangoLassi.  I also managed to get another article written.  This one was one that I had not worked on before, it was a completely beginning to end written in a single afternoon article.  That is three in the past week or two.  I am keeping a good pace.  Now if I can just keep that up.  If I could turn out two per week all of the time then I would be in great shape because I would get time off from time to time.

It was a nice day to work, Joe and Brittany spent most of the day out in their theatre having a movie day and everyone else was at the Grices’.  It was probably my most productive work day since before Christmas!

Today is also the last day that we have before Francesca goes back to work.  We, Dominica and I that is, will be watching all of the kids tomorrow because they do not have school until Tuesday.  So our plan is to stay here tomorrow and hit the road to drive back north again on Tuesday morning.  I would love to be on the road long before seven to get as much driving done as possible as early as possible.  But I want to get a good, long night of sleep in too.  It might be impossible to leave that early.

The plan is to drive to as close to Canton, Ohio as we can manage on Tuesday, then spend the night in a hotel.  It is a triple award points week with Choice Hotels so we will take advantage of that.  We will nearly earn a free night for every night that we stay this week!  Perfect timing for us.  Then Wednesday morning we will drive the last little bit to my family in Ohio and spend the entire day with them there.  Then head east and just grab a hotel as soon as we get tired which, we assume, will be in as little as an hour.  We would like to at least cross into Pennsylvania if possible.  We will grab another hotel (still at triple points) for the night.  Then, on Thursday, we can get up whenever we wake up and do the rest of the drive home to Peekskill and get in at a good time with very little effort.  In all it makes for only one hard day of driving and I have plenty of chance to rest up for that.  So we need to pack the car completely tomorrow evening so that we are all ready to go.

I have found Trivia Crack on my iPhone and have been playing that the last few days.  Madeline introduced me to it.  I have gotten Andy playing it too, now.

I finally got around to editing another one of Dominica and my Kidding Around Europe Podcasts today too.  We have had two of them done and waiting for me to edit them for the longest time.  That is something that I am going to have to be doing continuously while I am in Europe.

At nearly seven I went over to Francesca’s house where she and Dominica had made stews for dinner.  We ate and hung out for a little while.  They were mostly engaged in planning for the Disney World trip in March that I cannot go on since I will just be starting my new job.

Emily and I went to Walmart to do some shopping.  I picked up a one terabyte hard drive to use with the laptop to offload files because the laptop is completely out of space from working with just a single GoPro video.  That was a bit of a problem.  So I needed some way to be able to keep working.  I also stocked up on soap and shower supplies for the house.

On the way back to the Grices’, Emily and I did a run to Sonic and picked up dessert for everyone who wanted some.

Francesca was ready to head to bed by the time that we got back.  She has to go to work tomorrow even though the kids do not have school tomorrow.

We got back to Joe and Brittany’s house and got our girls right off to bed.  It was a little after ten by the time that they climbed into bed.

Dominica and I went out to the theatre and watched Joe’s copy of Ted which neither of us have ever seen and we have been wanting to see.  It was decent.  Nothing special but a cute, fun movie.  And another one that we have been wanting to see but have not had the chance.  We are bringing down our list of unwatched movies very quickly.

Got to bed around midnight.  I made #1 for the week on Trivia Crack.  I am not really sure what that means but… yay!  I guess.

Tomorrow is packing day.  I have a lot of work to catch up on still and Dominica is going to be getting the car loaded all day so that we are prepared to leave.