Long days in the car like this one are always a bit odd when it comes to perceving the passage of time. We’ve been on the road for 11 hours and it feels like absolutely nothing has happened. Of course, I was driving roughly half of that time, but I think if I were asked to account for the other half of the day I’d be hard pressed. I can say I did a bunch of things: listened to some podcasts, played some Mario Kart & Hearthstone, read some news, marked a bunch of things in the journal, stopped at our first NPS site, and probably a dozen other things. With only an hour and a half until our destination for the night I’m going to get my blog entry (mostly) done for the day so I can claim at least one actual accomplishment for the day.
We have plans to hang out at the pool for awhile with dinner tonight. Hopefully the pool in real life lives up to the pictures on the website. Being the first day there’s not even road trip chores to take care of tonight. The laundry is still all clean and the packs are already loaded with water for our first hike. I suppose the first round of PBJ&C’s will need to be prepared for the first lunch on the trail, but that should be about all that needs to be done.
So with not much to report on from day 1 I wanted to explain a little bit about our day -1. Since I was out of school nearly two weeks before the girls there was a lot of time for me to take care of trip stuff. Somehow day -1 was still a marathon of one last minute preparation after another. Of course, there was a tab in The Spreadsheet dedicated to tracking both complete and still looming over us. I’ll spare you the suspense and let you know that we did successfully check everything off the list by the end of the day.
Perhaps appropriately, my first task of the day wasn’t even on the list. I woke up to the announcement that the Packers had announced the date for their annual Family Night. That’s right, the last day of prep for this trip began with planning for the next. Although they threw us for a loop and moved the event to a Saturday rather that a Sunday, I managed to get everything worked out. From there I tackled the rest of the bookkeeping tasks and moved straight on to yardwork. Meanwhile, the girls finished up cleaning the last few rooms we hadn’t gotten to the day before.
At 11:15 we decided to part ways. The girls headed off to the doctor to have Zoe’s cast removed (which I sure she will write about in detail) while I got in one last haircut. We were able meet just in time for an ice cream lunch at Zoo City Treats.
Then the real adventure began – loading Fred. I decided to start with food since that seemed to pose the biggest challenge. Everything we purchased at Target, plus the two Costco runs, and the miscellaneous stuff from around the house we wanted to include would need to fit in just a few designated spaces. When I first brought it all out to Fred it seemed like a nearly impossible task as it nearly filled the truck. After a lot of repacking (protip:reinforce the best packages with duct tape and reuse them the whole trip) I managed to cram everything either into the hidden space under Fred’s main deck, the bear cans, or the back seat.
From there it took Molly about an hour to pack up the bathroom bag while I packed the camping&hiking gear. By the time we had the rest of the bags shoved into Fred it was 5:00 and we were starving. After some good-byes with our neighbors (who made us some adorable cards, I’m super psyched for Tunnel Day, Harry!) we were off to dinner. It’s become tradition to have this last dinner at home at Chipotle for two main reasons (1)we don’t want to mess up the clean house (2)we don’t want to cook. I don’t know if the day was actually any more exhausting than previous years, but I felt the need to add a margarita to my order. From there it was home and more or less straight to bed.
Our plan this morning had been to get up at 5:30, but Mol was a bit heavy on the snooze button and when I finally heard her alarm go off it was 6:15. I decided that “On the Road Again” would be our soundtrack for the morning so I cued up every version available on Spotify. Perhaps that repetition helped everyone move a little more quickly because we were on the road ourselves before 7.