If you�ve ever seen the movie �The Grapes of Wrath�, you�ll remember the extended Joad family packing everything they owned or could carry into a huge rickety old truck and driving for the lives, moving west out of draught-stricken Oklahoma during the Depression towards California, the promised land.It was kind of like that.
1993: Sibs and I decide that it is time to a) take our children to DW together, to create a wonderful family bonding experience (without their fathers, since my Hubs won�t go, hers is a Scumbag, and her children�s actual father is Satan), and b) to drive there, since everyone should drive to Florida once, right? (I guess it�s an east coast thing.)
We had taken a variety of dad-less trips with the kids over the years, to amusement parks, the shore, once to Connecticut. Generally, J1, her oldest, was not a part of these jaunts, since he was older and doing his own thing. This summer he would be 19, and not coming along. The J twins were 16, R was 13, and K was 10. Experience led us to believe that she would be the challenge on the trip, and the other five of us took turns in the months leading up to our August adventure to remind her that she would have to be grown up, not whine, not complain, not be demanding, or she would ruin the trip for everyone.
We booked a camper again in DW�s Fort Wilderness, the only place 6 people could stay without getting an extra room. Two women, four kids, only one boy. He would be outnumbered.
My car at that time was a big Astro van. It would be our magic carpet to Florida. We prepared, and then we prepared more. I would be doing most of the driving (or all, as it turned out), so we planned to stop over two nights on the way down, and two on the way back. We made reservations. We went to Triple A and got maps and books and more maps. We budgeted ourselves; we knew what we needed and what we would spend.
Certainly we would need snacks for the car. At which point, my sister remarked that since J2 was diabetic (for about 2 years only at that point), it would be best if everyone didn�t eat food in front of him that he couldn�t eat himself.
Uh-oh.
We did want to make sure he had what he needed when he needed it (like juice, mostly) so we packed food into the car as if we were headed to a primitive land (Florida) where supermarkets were unheard of. There was barely room for people. We thought it would be better for the kids if they had more floor space to stretch out, so we removed the center seat from the van, creating a playpen of sorts. At any given moment, two kids were seat-belted into an actual seat, and two were lying on the floor.
We had adventures, we had fun. Once, all the kids fell asleep with rap music playing on their boom box that neither Sibs nor I could reach and we thought we would kill ourselves. We stopped at South of the Border, an experience never to be forgotten or repeated. We pretended to have only three kids with us at the motels along the way, since 6 in a room isn�t allowed. One kid always had to sleep on the floor; they took turns. No one would share a bed with K, who was known to have a long-term bed-wetting problem, although it never surfaced on the trip.
I thought it a good idea safety-wise to be prepared, so I took the plunge and bought a cell-phone before we left. I think it weighed ten pounds.
And then, we were there.
