Road Trip

The things we do for our family can be a mixture of joy or an enduring painfully drawn out experience. Recently I had the seemingly never ending pains of a long road trip with my family.

It was supposed to be a series of joyous occasions traveling with two of my grand kids, my youngest daughter (the one who has been sick this past year and a half) and my wife to make our way out of the frozen north land of Alaska to the sunny south and the warmer weather of Florida.

We were going to make this a combination trip to visit with my mama who lives with my brother’s family in Jacksonville Beach and also travel across the northern stretches of Florida to attend my daughter’s wedding in Ft. Walton Beach in the panhandle region. The logistics of this is complicated by the fact that Alaska Airlines only travels to two cities in Florida, Miami and Orlando.

We left Alaska early in the morning (4 am) with the knowledge that we would not arrive until almost midnight. This would include two long airplane flights each way and additional driving once we arrived in the sunshine state.

Traveling with a 20 month old and a five year old who still cannot be reasoned with led to a series of events that would make for great reality television as we navigated our way across the country crossing 12 states, a portion of Canada, and a climate change in temperature from 6 degrees departing Anchorage to 76 degrees arriving in Orlando.

I’ll describe in later posts the wildly comical, the heartfelt moments, as well as those that brought me to the conclusion that I will never travel cross country with small ones if I can help it again.

After two weeks on the road it is nice to finally sleep in a bed that feels just right and not another “3 bears” experiment trying to find one that fit or was somewhat comfortable to help the need for a good night’s sleep. I never found one until I returned home and slept soundly for the first time since leaving what now seems like long ago.

I wanted to say tonight that everyone made it back ok, bruised somewhat, egos and personalities fractured, while the theme seemed to be that everyone, adults and kids alike that no one wanted to see each other for a few days.

Family love is unconditional but there are sometimes those moments where you would love to bring back those long ago times of public discipline to gain control without someone looking at you as a child abuser. My mama is 80 in a couple of weeks and her slapping around my brother and sister lent itself to a fear and respect not seen with the generation of kids now.

On a side note, I was hoping that by the time we returned to Alaska we would be almost halfway through our winter breakup but returning we found that there had been over 24 inches of snowfall during our time away. So much for warmer weather here in our arctic wonderland as our days grow longer.

Ice