I know...I was gone for a while. Did you all miss me? The past two weeks were spent in a car travelling up and down the East coast. Yes, we had many wild adventures. Yes, there were tears, tantrums and spouts of bitter frustration, but, in the end, it was one of the best times of my life. So, I will tell you about the trip one day at a time.
Mandi, my college best friend and roommate, joined us in Georgia on Tuesday, May 28th. We left for our first leg of the trip the very next morning. The kids were excited and stocked up with an entire cooler full of snacks, plenty of DVDs and a dad sitting in the back to help with the boredom. I was the designated driver, and Mandi was in charge of making sure that I didn't fall a sleep at the wheel. I'm pretty sure that I had the easiest of the three jobs.
Surprisingly, the car ride to Greenville, South Carolina was really uneventful; so, we will skip that part of the story and hop straight to the first stop - The Children's Garden. This was such a nice little place to take a short stop. The garden was first created to encourage children to get out of the house for a while an experience the joys that come with nature. I thought that the volunteers did an excellent job on making it kid friendly and a fun place to visit.
The poles were covered with murals from different artists, and there were plenty of statues to play on throughout. There were also a plethora of musical instruments for the kids to pound on along with hundreds of beautiful flowers. We spent about a hour there before getting back in the car, but it was well worth the stop.
The next place we stopped was about 4 hours away in Durham, North Carolina at the Museum of Life and Sciences. I was excited and nervous about this stop initially because of the price. It wasn't cheap, and they charged almost as much for the kids as they did the adults. In the end, it was all worth it though.
As you enter, there is a big play center with tables full of blocks. I think that my kids could have spent an hour there alone...especially Erin. Matt, as much as he will deny it, enjoyed playing with the blocks too.
The next area was especially cool because it had a live simulation of how a tornado forms. The kids went as far as getting up onto the giant block and playing with the tornado. It was fun to watch them giggle and laugh as they broke it apart and watched it reform again.
There were several other areas of the museum that were cool, one of our favorites was a spinning map. It was about 3 feet in diameter. If you spun it one direction, it would zoom in, the other direction out. The you could tilt it to get to the location that you wanted. We found all of our houses on it and even some foreign places just for fun. All of the adults thought it was super cool.
Everyone had a great time until there was only about 45 minutes left before the museum closed and we hadn't even gone outside yet to see the animals. The biggest problem that we kept running across was getting Ali to transition from one area to the next.
"Ali, we have to go."
(Long pause, then no response.)
"Ali, we have to go. We are running out of time and will miss the animals."
"I'm busy."
After much coaxing, we got her to go downstairs and almost out the door, but it was too late, she had found another play area that interested here.
By the time that we got her outside, Matt was frustrated, and Ali was crying. This seems to be pretty typical when we don't have the time to do things at Ali's pace.
We had no idea how big the outside was and spent most of the time walking without seeing many of the animals. By the time that it was over, I came to the conclusion that just staying inside and ignoring the outside would have been better.
We stayed at the museum for 3 hours, and it wasn't nearly long enough for the kids to get to play with everything that they wanted to play with. Oh well, maybe next time.
We found a hotel that night at a Best Western. I felt kind of bad because Matt found one for much cheaper, but I didn't feel safe in the neighborhood; so, we ended up spending much more. If I hadn't had the kids, I would have probably been fine with it. Matt didn't seem to care though. He was happy to get a suite where we all had beds.
I would have slept really well too if I hadn't been sharing a room with two people that snore...loud.
