You Gotta Start Somewhere

Our goal for this morning was to leave the house by 7:30am. So naturally we were pulling out of the driveway at precisely 8:23am. Here’s the boys ready to roll!!

We took a photo similar to this at the start of our trip last year. I sense a yearly tradition in the making!!

After five stops in the great town of Ferrum, VA (our hometown), we started our journey towards the east coast at 9:15am.

We could have made better time traveling through DC and Baltimore but I wanted the boys to experience the Chesapeak Bay Bridge Tunnel (CBBT). On a day mostly filled with driving on uninteresting interstates, the CBBT was a welcome breath of beautiful scenery.

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Here’s a video of us traveling the CBBT: Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel

We have talked up this trip to the boys for so long that Everett is finding it hard to believe this is actually the real deal.

“Daddy, do you promise this is our big trip?”

He asked some form of that question at least five times today. Maybe it just doesn’t seem cool enough for him yet. We’ll try to convince him tomorrow!

Not to be outdone, Jackson hit us with this bombshell of a question several hours into our journey today:

“Are we actually going to do anything fun on this trip?”

Is there an appropriate parental response to that question?

Anyways, we made it over the CBBT at exactly 3:10pm. We needed some time out of the car and stopped at the Eastern Shore of Virginia Welcome Center.

One of our favorite things about these type of places is the free entertainment they provide.

Travel Brochures!!!

We usually let the boys pick out four or five for themselves. These will keep the boys occupied in the car for minutes on end. Seriously though, they do enjoy looking through them.

The highlight of our drive after crossing the CBBT was the time we thought our GPS had gone haywire but in reality, we both forgot how to use a GPS.

Let me explain. We thought the GPS was telling us to make a u-turn immediately because we weren’t on the right road. What we eventually figured out was the GPS wanted us to continue for 142 miles and then make a u-turn. We struggled with this for a good 45 minutes. That’s the end of that story.

Maryland was the only other state we drove through today. Our family does this thing where whenever we drive into another state everyone gets a high five. Here’s Carter and Jackson getting ready for their high five as we crossed the Maryland border.

I was going to finish this post with a catchy phrase like: “Until the next adventure!” Then I realized that’s what the Octonauts say at the end of each episode. What can I say? I like cartoons and I’m basically just a larger version of my boys.

Until the next adventure!!

I said it anyways.