Drive to PA

( . . . cue ominous music . . .)

I mentioned we had a wonderful time up in PA this weekend, and we did. We also had about the worst drive ever to get up there! But let me back up even further, to last Thursday. We had lots of errands to run, including the Christian bookstore, Walmart, Target, and the library. The ONLY thing we had to get at Target was a pair of blue dress pants for Nathan, who had outgrown his last pair. At the checkout, the cashier was talking about the kids. I can't emphasize enough how often this happens, but somehow I was distracted over it. Maybe because she was trying to figure out the girl/boy breakdown, and she only mentioned 3 boys. I told her 4 boys, but as I was looking around, I only saw 3 . . . oh yes, Nathan was getting a drink, which led to everyone wanting water. When we finally made it out to the van, I realized that no one had the bag containing the one thing we bought--Nathan's pants. So I ran back in, the cashier looked at me like she had never seen me before--and the pants weren't there. I guess the man behind me picked up that bag too. Sigh. We went off to the library, with me feeling totally frustrated with myself for not noticing. On our way back from the library, I called Target to see if anyone had, by some miracle, turned the pants back in. The lady said no, but then she told me that if I brought in my receipt, I could get the money refunded or get another pair of pants! What?! I couldn't believe that, since Target has such an unforgiving return policy! And maybe she's wrong, but we high-tailed it right back there. I wasn't going to let that get away! So all's well that end's well--we got the last pair of blue size 12 pants. But it was certainly an omen indicative of how the next day was going to go!

Thursday evening at 11:00 I was finishing getting a little bit of school work out before filling snack bags for the trip Friday, when I became aware of a noise from the kitchen. "Hmmmm," I thought, "I didn't start the dishwasher, and I'm not running a load of laundry . . ." I went over to investigate, and when I opened the door of the cabinet under the sink, water sprayed out everywhere. Ack! We have a separate faucet for filtered water, and the thing that attaches it to the cold water line just . . . unattached somehow. What a huge mess! I was sooooo incredibly thankful that this did not happen Friday night, however. I can not even imagine the flood in the kitchen and basement that would have resulted from that! So we got the water stopped, but it was a huge clean up. Finally we went to bed around 1:00 . . . but as I went into our room, another door opened, and Jonathan stumbled out crying. Yes! He had an accident! So we had to get new sheets, start laundry, move Caleb to the top bunk, etc. It was a late night.

We got off Friday afternoon at 2:00 to drive to the Poconos in NE Pennsylvania. We have made this drive before, although the last time was almost 3 years ago. It usually takes us about 4 1/2 hours to get there, so we estimated we'd get there by 7:30, with nursing stops. We started out in a lot of traffic as we left town because of construction, but we were able to go around that, so everything was great. I entered in Rose's address on our GPS, and we set off. It took up over to I-81, which is quite a bit farther west of where we live, but we didn't really think about that. It was until we'd been driving awhile that I happened to look at a map and realized that we really added on quite a bit of mileage. How did that happen? I honestly don't know. We stopped aroun 4:15 because Faith needed to eat. That was poor coordination on my part--we should have been able to drive more than 2 hours before she needed to eat, and I knew we would have to stop a second time. We picked an exit with a Wendy's, Subway, and McDonalds, so we could eat an early dinner, but we never saw the Wendy's or Subway. We just kept driving--over 5 minutes off the road (we were actually in the town of Shippensburg, Carri!). Finally we found the McDonalds, but we could not figure out where the other restaurants had been. As we drove back, we saw a big shopping center that was TOTALLY hidden by trees if you were coming from the freeway, and that's where the other restaurants were--less than 1/2 mile away from the freeway exit! Oh well.

We got back on the freeway, and promptly came to a complete stop. No one moved for a long time. Of course, we were 10 miles away from the closest exit, and there was a big gully in the median, so we couldn't turn around. Occasionally we would move up a few car lengths, then everything would stop again. We were expecting a major car accident or construction or something, but eventually things started moving, and we could never see any problem at all! Totally weird, and a huge time sink.

We made good time the rest of the way, and we thought things were looking up. At least we'd get there before dark. We got off the highway onto a smaller PA road. The road that runs through Rose's town was off this main road, so we were expecting a bigger intersection. I even thought I might recognize it. We drove for a long time, blindly obeying our GPS thing. We were a little suspicious because it told us we were to turn onto "Unnamed Road". As I said, it was the main road through Rose's town, so I was pretty darn sure it had a name. But maybe this was a shortcut? When we got to the Unnamed Road, it was little more than a paved cowpath. I told Bob there was NO WAY we were turning on that, so we kept going. The GPS recalculated, and told us to turn on another road. At least that one had a name, but it still did not look at all familiar. But we turned, and we turned again, and we wound around and around on small, dark PA back country roads, with me getting more and more alarmed becuase nothing looked right, and I knew the lake wasn't that far away from the main road. Finally we reached the lake . . . and IT WAS THE WRONG LAKE!! I about had a heart attack. It was getting dark, and it seriously looked like the kind of place where the axe murderer would step out of the woods in front of us (of course, we were in the big van, so we could have mowed him down . . . but what if we ran out of gas?!) . . . Bob was in favor of driving a little farther, but I told him we had to turn around NOW so we could at least make it back to the main road before darkness completely fell, and we missed one of the crazy turns! I looked at the atlas and found the lake we were at, which was a good 10 miles away from Rose's lake. We made it back to the main road, praise the Lord, and then it was easy to get to Rose's by looking at the actual atlas, which apparently has her lake down at the right place, unlike our GPS system! We rolled in around 9:00, over 7 hours after we left! VERY stressful drive. VERY crabby Claire, who could not believe that she had trusted a mechanical device 2 times instead of her trusty atlas. Never again!

So you can see what a surprise it was to actually have a very enjoyable weekend with Bob's family! I was expecting some kind of major fireworks! I'll post more about being there later. I've got to get kids down, since we're in the middle of standardized testing!