Vacation: Part One

I think I am going to break up the trip report into a few different parts. We will see how this goes. I have a lot of pictures to show you!

The Drive:

We set our alarms for 12:30 am on Saturday. Ryan and I got up, and got dressed, put a few last minute things into the car, and went to wake the boys. They woke up very easily. No fussing or fighting. Dylan was first. He sat in a daze in the living room while we got Ethan up. Once Ethan was up, we loaded into the car and headed out. By this time it was about 1 am.

I thought for sure that the boys would quietly fall back asleep since it was so early. Yeah not so much. About 10 minutes in they were both jabbering and wide awake. But that was fine no big deal really. I drove the first half of the trip. Most of it with a massive headache. I don't know why, but it was awful. I was a bit paranoid also, because all the way out of Ohio and part of West Virginia, the road was in countryside so there were deer standing along side the road. It made me so nervous because you never know when those suckers will leap out in front of you. Luckily we were fine.

Once we got on to the interstate in West Virginia, I was able to relax a bit. The boys were in and out of noise making. I think they finally realized that they were still tired. And it was still dark out. My headache wouldn't go away at all. I had taken something but it wasn't going away. It was almost 6 am when we were getting close to Wytheville Va. It is also the half way point. Or close to it. So we stopped for gas, breakfast and switched drivers. We stopped into a Shoney's for breakfast. We got there just as they were opening. The waitress was sweet as could be. She was very pleasant and friendly, and she was very quick with the coffee. I think I downed 4 cups of coffee in no time at all. I hoped that the caffeine would help get rid of the headache. They had a breakfast buffet so we just ate from it. The boys' was free! Can't beat that! Ethan ate very well. Dylan didn't seem all that hungry, but ate some. We did a diaper change and bathroom break before we all left the restaurant.

On The Road Again

So we got to our half way point and moved on. We ran into some nasty fog in Virginia or North Carolina...I really wasn't sure where we were. But it was very thick. Traffic slowed to a crawl for quite a while. I don't know how long it lasted, but I was just glad that I wasn't the one driving. We get through that only to get into some monsoon thunderstorms on the North Carolina/South Carolina border. The rain was coming down so fast that the roads were flooding. We were hydroplaning here and there and figured if we were, then cars coming towards us were too. So as soon as we found a place to stop, we did. We pulled into a gas station parking lot in South Carolina to wait it out. I got Ethan out of his seat and changed his diaper. Dylan was busy watching a Thomas the Train dvd and didn't really care what was going on. We waited there for about 30 minutes or so. Ryan had taken Dylan in to use the bathroom and got me more caffeine to help the headache that I still had. It was still raining when we left and the roads were still not the best, but we had looked at the radar and thought if we just kept driving south we would be out of it shortly. And we were. It was much more enjoyable to drive and ride on dry roads! We were making excellent time, and were way ahead of schedule despite the weather. So we just took our time from then on. We made one more stop to fill up with gas before we got into what we thought would be busy Myrtle Beach area traffic. Turns out that we were early enough, that there was no congestion. Just a smooth ride. We got into Garden City beach where the rental office was around 2 pm. The sun was shining and the weather was gorgeous. We were beyond excited and so happy to be there.

Stay tuned for Part 2!!!