Road Trip

Not quite the same as the college road trip with the guys. This weekend we took Nate on his first overnight trip outside of Austin. We made a trip to see a number of relatives. We managed to see two of Nate's great-grandmothers, two great aunts, one set of grandparents, and an uncle. We found that we had lots of baby sitters during the days. Everyone was wanting to hold Nate.

The amount of baby stuff we had to stuff in the car was significant. Of course, there was the car seat. He slept well in the car which made the trip pretty easy. Then there was the portable crib, stroller, lots of clothes and diapers, breastpump and milk supplies, boppy, blankets, and rags. Plus probably a few other items I can't recall at the moment.

Nate traveled very well. We spent a total of about 14 hours in the car over the weekend. Most of the time he just slept in the car, at least as long as we were moving. We've found that unless Nate is really hungry he is out whenever the car is moving. At a young age he already doesn't like stop signs and red lights. On the way home we ran into some serious traffic south of Dallas (probably a wreck or a couple of wrecks). As we slowed and saw the massive backup ahead Nate woke up and started getting really fussy. My wife managed to jump into the backseat to try and comfort him. However, I could see that this was not going to be a good solution as we weren't going anywhere fast.

At this point, I grabbed the blackberry and looked at how bad it was on google maps. The traffic on google maps is a great thing. The only thing better with google maps and the blackberry may be the GPS built-into the phone. So the traffic backup was worse than I originally thought. The traffic was backed up for miles. I decided that we needed to keep moving. So I decided to take the back roads. We were close to an exit so I used the shoulder to make it to the exit sooner. Then using google maps and the GPS so I could track our progress as we made it through the back roads. Unfortunately, some of the small roads I picked were gravel (actually they were mud with a couple rocks). So travel was a little slow (but faster than the interstate) and my car is covered in mud.

In the end, we kept moving and Nate stayed asleep. I'm pretty sure we saved some time taking the back roads, but more importantly the drive was nice and quiet.