Roadtrip!

As you can tell, I've been absent for some time. Please blame the 2 year old who resides with me. So I was thinking, no time like the present to start again! But, what to write about? I have to ask myself, "Self? What do you want this blog to be? To do for you?" And I answered, "Well, self, I think it should hold memories and share stories. No matter how boring that may be for your painfully low number of readers." And really, who am I to argue with myself?

This past weekend we took a Roadtrip! We got Liam all pumped up with the promise of fishies, birdies, froggies, etc. We were going to go to the aquariam in the Mall of America and to the Minnesota Zoo. This meant a night in the hotel with Liam. No problem, right? I mean, we've taken him places overnight before...just never in a hotel. We always had friends or family silly enough to put us all up.

The trip started off nice. We stopped at the Medford Outlet Mall and we all got a little something. I spent way too much money, but hey, what are roadtrips for?? Liam loved the aquariam, of course. No suprise there. And then we get to the hotel. We walk in our room...the bottom lip comes out, it starts trembling, and silent tears roll down his checks. "Bye-bye, home, mommy truck." Ugh.

But then we had a quick recovery. Which was great! He's flushing the toleit and looking out the window and in all the drawers. I explained that it was bedtime and we needed to get some sleep so that we could go to the zoo. This worked long enough to get PJ's on. Then we remembered we did not have the binkie. Oops.

Now let me insert here that we ONLY use the binkie at night-night time. It does not leave his room (apparently not even for overnight trips.)

So, we explain that the binkie is at home. He says, "Binkie, home." And proceeds to punish us by refusing to go to sleep for over an hour. But, he does eventually and sleeps all night, no issues with the MIA binkie. (You can imagine my plots to get rid of the thing completely now that I have his number.)

The next morning we hit the zoo right as it opens and have a blast, staying until Liam was falling asleep in his stoller using his new stuffed turtle as his pillow. We said bye-bye to the monkeys for at least 10 minutes and then headed straight home. Liam was asleep before we were even out of town.

I was dozing on the way home, reflecting on our successful trip and daydreaming about some wonderful things to come and all of a sudden I feel the truck start to lurch. Luckily, my wonderful mechanic husband is driving and obviously nothing could be wrong and even if it did he's going to fix it without even slowing down. No worries, right? Wrong.

Next thing I know, we're walking down the highway - with my 2 year old! - AWAY from my truck and towards a bike shop that we think is open. Luckily it was open and a wonderfully patient man helped us pick a trusted tow truck company, talked the owner into letting us park at the shop overnight, helped me call car rental places, got us all bottles of water, gave Liam stickers to play with and let us loiter in the store for over an hour.

So, in short, our unplanned expenses were as follows:

Cost of towing us a QUARTER of a mile down the road: $90.00 (Highway robbery if ask me.)
Cost of renting a (kick-ass) car: $42.00 (I think Chris flirted with the Avis girl.)
Cost of part to fix truck: $300.00 (Apparently Chris can't flirt with the parts guy.)

PLUS, a two hour delay getting home, 6 additional hours for Chris and the neighbor to go get the truck and bring it back, 3 more hours for Chris to track down and pick up the part we needed in order for me to have my truck back by Monday morning and the additional gas for all of this.

This TRIPLED the cost of our roadtrip. Ahhhhhhhhh, memories.