We got home yesterday after driving through the night. We left Springfield, MO and arrived 26 hours later, which included 3 hours of quality sleep at a rest area as well as requisite food, gas, and fluid disposal stops. That’s 1370 miles of driving, a pretty decent clip.

It is so good to be home, to be surrounded by your own creature comforts, to sleep in your own bed.

The trip was an unqualified success. There was a torrential downpour as we left
Tucson, a diluvian rain while in Colorado, and a solid wall of thunderstorms the entire time we driving through Wisconsin. For a few days it was over 100 degrees while we were in the upper midwest, which was absolutely miserable. I’ll take a month of Tucson at 105 any day over a single day of it in North Dakota.

There were a few casualties on the way. We have some light up tinkerbell shoes still MIA. Our copy of “Bride and Prejudice” is in my grandma’s DVD player. There’s a lonely pink shirt stranded in Illinois. That’s about average for one of our trips, not including my glasses. Those are still somewhere in Pueblo, CO, although it rained so much that night I picture them floating away to a river and washing up hundreds of miles downstream.

I was looking forward to this trip a lot more than I had in a while, mostly because the kids were of an age to really be part of the vacation rather than just along for the ride. Boy did they not dissapoint. I’m downright bursting with pride at how well they did for almost the whole trip. And maybe the coolest part? Despite all the places we went and things we saw, when asked what their favorite part of the trip was they both talked about people they had seen. I love that they remember the connections we made more than the things we did, because that’s so much more important in life.