Do you see the skepticism just oozing from him? I am pretty sure he will become more skeptical when he finds out first hand how much time he will be spending in the car this summer.
We have a lot of driving to do.
And the whole thing has officially started.
We kicked off our crazy summer with putting Jeremiah on a plane yesterday. He has asked me not to say exactly where he is going, but suffice to say he is out of the country for an entire month.
Which means I get to make the first of 4 – 20 hour drives back and forth to Washington by myself.
Wahoo!
Seriously? No. I am not terribly excited about this.
I am, however, excited to get it over with.
The reason we are putting ourselves through this torture?
So last fall our good friends, Seth and Cassie, got engaged. They live here in town and are getting married here, we are SO excited for them and Jeremiah is going to be the best man, Linus the ring bearer and Juliette will be the flower girl.
They scheduled their wedding for July 9th.
Well, then over Christmas BOTH Jeremiah’s sisters got engaged!
Yay! We are also super excited for both of them.
Of course!
After a day or two I put two and two together and came up with, oh dear, they could potentially decide to get married on dates that put Seth and Cassie’s wedding in the middle which would mean we would have to go back and forth between here and Washington for weddings.
Well, that’s exactly what happened. Liz is getting married June 25th and Natalie is getting married July 16th.
Heavens.
So I priced everything out and weighed the options and came up with, despite the price of diesel, plane tickets would be way more expensive (they have also gone up in price of course) so I decided to drive. Knowing Jeremiah would not be involved with most of it, it was left up to me to make the decision.
So Jeremiah asked me to send him a itinerary of what I am doing, because he can’t figure it out. So I think I will copy and paste this, check it out:
- May 27th: Jeremiah left for one month
- I pack and load up the truck for the first drive and also do a small amount of cooking/baking/planning for a bridal shower for Cassie
- I load up the kids and the dog (who will not have been fed meat for several days to prevent him from stink bombing us the entire way) and leave our house at o’dark thirty.
- About 2-3 days later I expect to arrive at my parents house (I will be driving slow to get better gas mileage – if you are going through states like Wyoming, Utah, Eastern Oregon or Washington and get stuck behind a red Ford Excursion named Clifford the Big Red Truck going 65 MPH – that’s me 🙂 Deal with it.)
- I drive down to Portland without the kidlets
- I will accompany my sister on the last six miles of her first marathon which she WILL finish with NO walking! (Anyone that wants to come cheer her on would be more than welcome!)
- I will drive back up to my parents
- I will pick Jeremiah up late at night at the SeaTac airport (YAY!)
- Liz’s big day!
- We load up the truck with kids and no dog – he gets to stay at Doggy Heaven on Earth (AKA my parents house) – and we will drive to Yellowstone National Park 🙂 with a few stops to see family along the way.
- We plan to camp for a couple days at Yellowstone and then make our way back home, hopefully arriving somewhere between July 4-6th. We like to keep things loose…
- Seth and Cassie’s wedding
- load the truck up AGAIN. No wait. Actually I will likely just leave it loaded, just wash laundry and put back in. So I will just be loading kids this day. So load kids into truck and (leaving Jeremiah at home cause he does have to work a little bit this summer) I will drive BACK up to Washington.
- arrive back at my parents house
- My sister-in-law Amanda and I will bake about 200 cupcakes and a small cake and at some point I will likely go pick Jeremiah up at the airport.
- We will transport cake items to wedding location, frost them all and Natalie will get married.
- take Jeremiah back to the airport
Then my return date is sorta loose. You see within all of this, both my sister-in-law Andrea and my sister Kirsten are expecting babies. Andrea will hopefully have her baby around Liz’s wedding and then hopefully by the time I want to leave Kirsten will have had her baby. But if for some odd reason she goes later than July 16th then I plan to stick around until little Gideon makes an appearance. So sometime between July 18th and August 1st I will make my home, by myself with my 3 children and our Jack Russell.
Then school starts for Linus on August 15th.
You got all that?
So if my posting slows a bit – you now know why.
I might transform more to blogging than cooking 🙂 But I will do my best.
So if you have trouble keeping up with me this summer you can refer back to this post and don’t worry, my husband can’t keep up either.
I have to admit I am slightly terrified of traveling so many hours in the car with my children. But I plan to be prepared – maybe this preparedness will become the topic of a few future posts. We will see what I come up with for projects. I also did finally relent and bought a portable DVD player, much to my dismay.
I hate plugging them into the ‘TV’ but 80+ hours in the car in one summer will result in desperation and last resorts.
Wish me luck!
- Huckleberry Plum Pie - January 1, 2017
- Fresh Mango Sorbet - July 17, 2016
- Steak Caesar Salad - June 8, 2016
