The Orange Ball

The trip from McAllen to Tyler was long and hard. I talk about it like it was last week, when, in fact, it's been 6 months. It lasted a grueling 14 hours, I guess that Mapquest doesn't consider travel with children when it calculates 9 hours and 14 minutes.

I know, that's just drive time. It doesn't know that you're going to stop within the first 30 miles so that your daughter, who gets car sick going around the block, can puke up her breakfast. (I, then, gave her the max dose of children's Benadryl and she was much, much better.) Or the need to stop at nearly every town so that someone can go to the bathroom.

We actually only stopped in that 14 hours twice to eat and twice for gas. The rest of the trip was peppered with *I'm going to puke again* and *I can just pee on the side of the road if you stop*. Let me clarify, the first came from my daughter, the second from my son who is 7 and still believes that the world is his toilet.

It's actually an experience that I had chosen to forget. Stuck in a car with only one other adult, two children and a guinea pig. We followed the *men* in the U-haul. My poor Grace was stuck in the car the entire time. The two big kids got to take turns riding in the U-haul, which was completely awesome to them. (They were sad when I had to turn it back in.)

While we had my son in the car I gave him my camera to keep him entertained. He took about 300 pictures within about 5 miles. 300 pictures of trees, signs, the back of the U-haul, and other vehicles.

We stopped to eat at a very yummy BBQ place. I let him take the camera in and got about 100 pictures of the crap that those places like to sell, most of the pictures having something to do with candy (Hey, he's 7).

There were also about 50 random pictures of a hotel, the gas station (which shows the price of gas at $1.79), the inside of the car, and the guinea pig. The best pictures of the group, in my mommy opinion, are the two dozen or so of the orange ball that was included in his kid's meal from DQ.