Day 21: Sunday (HOME!!)

Just as we planned, Miss Mary served as alarm clock on our last day of the road trip. I was up by 5, feeding her, then we packed everything up, waking Danny at the last possible second. We pulled out of the driveway at 6:45, ready to tackle the final 490 miles of the trip down I-90. Both kids slept for most of the first two hours (alleluia!) while we woke up with breakfast in the car. Now, we have just 4.5 hours to go before we see our house for the first time in 3 weeks.

What will we miss most about this journey?
-Quality time together every day
-Being outside so much
-The beautiful countryside and incredible parks we visited
-The sight and sound of the mountains
-Red rocks
-The enormous sky
-Wildlife at every turn (most of which we'd miss if it weren't for Eagle Eye Jenny)
-The weather: amazing storms, cool mornings
-Long country roads
-75 mph speed limits
-Jenny's cooking
-Seeing Danny loving his cousins
-Camping
-Wall Drug billboard advertisements
-Bison traffic
-Picnic lunches at random parks across the country (Belgrade, Montana! Port Huron, Michigan)
-Merry-go-rounds at playgrounds (why don't our parks ever have these anymore??)
-Free hotel breakfasts
-Ridiculous comments from Danny, such as, "You're not entertaining me!" and, "I wish we were going to Radiator Springs instead of Colorado Springs!"
-Playing the license plate game
-Seeing the cousins fawn over Mary, and work so hard to get her to say "Ma!" instead of just "Da" all the times
-Hearing about Molly's "Stink of the Day"
-Danny's awesome "Boring Game": when he desperately asks, "what should I DO, Mommy?!", we play this game where he looks out the window and names all the boring things he sees: trees are boring! Cows are boring! Farms are boring! etc, no matter how un-boring the scenery.
-Danny will miss nearly unfettered access to DVD watching (when asked what he'd miss, he mentioned Cars characters, then also the Albany hotel and cinnamon butter.)
-Danny's announcement every time we'd see silos near train tracks (which was frequently) that, "we should camp there!" (see post from Day 7)
-Danny's lesson about what qualifies as an oasis in the desert (thank-you, Cat in the Hat (knows a lot about that) show!)
-Willoughby Wallaby Wommy, an Elephant sat on Mommy

Things we won't miss
-Unpacking the car, schlepping our things, repacking the car. Nearly every day
-Cooler maintenance: making sure it stays cold enough for our perishables (involving emptying everything into hotel mini fridges and/or buying more ice when fridges are not available. Every day.)
-Motorcycles
-Pumping in the car (milk, not gas)
-Washing pump parts in gas station bathrooms (oh, the glamour of the nursing mother on the road!)
-Merry-go-rounds at playgrounds (oh, right, we don't have them because children get injured!)
-Stinky cows
-Blogging (Ha! Just kidding!)

(FYI, this post was sent at 10:20 a.m., about 4 hours before our expected arrival in Melrose. I'll be sure to update once we actually ARRIVE home!)