Home! We’re home! We enjoyed our motel breakfast and then got on the road before 10 a.m. We only made three stops before arriving home around 3 p.m.

Our motel stay last night had a couple of funny happenings. First, on the way back to our room from the pool, Miguel decided to walk into a different motel room that had it’s door propped open. By the time I caught up to him the nice man inside was telling him that he should go back out into the hallway. I’m so relieved the man was nice! As I was leaning over telling Miguel to head to the stairs and not to go into people’s rooms, Judah decided to check out the nice man’s room. I caught Judah just as he got his hands on the door and I steered him away quickly, hissing to him that he must keep walking with me! What chaos! Keeping one’s ducks in a row is not easy!

The second funny thing that happened had to do with our two separate motel rooms. This is the first time we’ve ever rented two non-adjoining rooms for our family. It was all that was available, so we took it. Anyway, I was showing Luke and Amelia how to use the phone to call me in my room. We were running back and forth between the rooms, making sure the phones worked, and having fun talking on the phones to each other. We even got Judah involved, and he enjoyed talking to Luke and Amelia. Anyway, once we got the phones all figured out, I made sure that Luke and Amelia knew that they must ONLY dial the numbers I had written for them on the pad of paper. They must NOT dial any other numbers, because they might call a different room. And if they DID call a different room, they were to apologize very nicely and then hang up. Not five minutes after my little lecture, Luke came and told me that Amelia had called someone else’s room accidentally. So then I sent the message to Amelia through Luke that she was NOT to use the phones any more. Yikes!

The third thing happened at 2:30 a.m. I woke up realizing I had heard a knock at the door. I hopped out of bed worried about our children next door. I opened the door to find Luke standing there fully dressed. He explained that he had gone down for breakfast but he had forgotten to prop his door open when he went down, so he wondered if I would please open his door for him. I stared at my watch, blinked hard, and looked again to see if I was reading the time right.

“Luke, it’s the middle of the night”, I said.

“How can it be the middle of the night?” he asked, “the breakfast lady is downstairs.”

I just looked at him, not quite understanding why the breakfast lady was downstairs in the middle of the night, and said again, “Well, Luke, it IS the middle of the night, and you need to go back to bed. I’ll let you into your room.”

As I walked him back to his room, he said again quietly, and maybe almost to himself, “but the breakfast lady is downstairs…”

What a night! Fortunately, there wasn’t any other excitement. The kids really enjoyed the pool last night. The breakfast this morning was delicious! And best of all, the last leg of our trip went smoothly and we are HOME. After we got some things taken care of here at home I hurried to Aldi to get a few groceries to hold us over through the rest of this week.

Isaac pointed out to me that we were gone for almost two weeks. He’s right! I keep thinking “a week and a half”. But it’s really closer to two weeks. That’s a long time to be gone. Fortunately, all is well, and we’re all glad to be home. The dog seems pleased to see us, and we went and fetched Indigo the cat from my brother’s house. We’re all together again, for better or for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health.
Thanks for hanging out with me here in my travel blog. I felt like I had friends waiting to hear about my day, and I was eager to write every night about how things had gone.

Love,

Christie