North Carolina Family Vacation Day 8-- driving home

Saturday July 12, my alarm went off at 4:30 and I got up. It was time to head out for home from our week long vacation on the Crystal Coast. As I was getting our bed stripped of linens, I hear Bill say Hi to Benjamin who came walking into the kitchen. I woke the other two kids up and stripped all the bed and remade them. We said one last goodbye to the condo and headed out to the van. We left the condo at 5:10 am. We stopped by the rental office to drop off our keys and we were on the road at 5:20 am.

I dozed for a little bit, as did the kids. We stopped for breakfast around 8, and we went to McDonald's. The kids all had pancakes and apple juice…the fun thing about that was Benjamin decided to take Bill’s fork and ate most of his pancake with a fork, (this was a first as when we would give him a fork before he would just play with it).  We stopped to fill up the van around 10:45 and we surprised the kids with slushies and m&ms. We also put on the movie “Frozen” on a portable dvd player that we had borrowed from our in-laws. That kept the kids attention for the most part. When “Frozen” was over, we stopped for lunch at..McDonald's. It was the kids’ choice.

When we were back on the road, the boys fell asleep for a nap and we just drove and drove and drove. The drive wasn’t too bad….we hit backed up traffic twice around construction areas where traffic went down from 2 lanes to 1, but other than that it was okay.  Around 3 we had to stop for gas and we let the kids get ice cream cones at…McDonalds! LOL…Bill and I got a chocolate shake that was yummy. When we got back in the van, I put on “How to Train Your Dragon” for the kids, but they all quickly lost interest. So we switched the movie to “Cars” which they enjoyed….Just as the movie was ending, we pulled into our driveway…at 6:20pm. After a 13 hour drive, Bill, the kids and I were all glad to be home. It was a wonderful vacation full of happy memories, but it was also good to be home!