Road Trip!

It's been a couple years since we did a big road trip, a big trip being more than 5 or 6 hours, but Montana was calling our name so we were off like a heard of turtles.

Normally when we go to Montana we go to Jason's dad's house, spend the night then go on to Montana breaking the trip in two and making it much more manageable.

Well, that was the plan.

But sickness broke out at the Goodrich house starting with Jason who then gave it to me. It got pretty bad. Normally when I have a cold or sore throat I just take my meds and don't ever go to the Dr.s. For me I pretty much only see them for regular visits and when I'm preganant. But that Friday I woke up and physically could barely get out of bed until 4 or so, leaving the boys to spend pretty much the whole day watching TV and movies which they didn't mind one bit. At least they weren't sick too. My throat was so swollen I hadn't eaten or drank anything for a day and a half because of the pain so I gave in and took the boys with me to a quick visit to Zoom Care, I even got an appment for them because I knew what I had and that they would soon have it if they didn't already. The second the Dr. saw me she confirmed, strep. The boys had the very beginnings of it to so she gave us all meds. I'm sure I was a hot mess. Even as they were giving me the medicine and as I was paying I could barely stand and had to sit down for a few.  I even almost passed out. Ugh. I hate it when I feel so weak.

Luckily Jason went too, got his meds and because we were all in rare form we decided to push our leaving time another day so we could recover.

Well.....because we did that as we checked weather forecasts it showed if we went as planned (to Washington, spend the night, then Montana) the roads would be really slick and pretty dangerous. So we quickly decided we would beat the coming storm and push straight through to Montana so we would make it there in time for Christmas.

I had prepped a lot to keep the boys occupied during the trip. Audiobooks (yea for Magic Tree House!), new small toys for them to unwrap as we went, new headphones for movies, colored pencils, coloring books, books, stickers.....lots of fun stuff. It all worked pretty well.

Despite all the difficulties of our getting out of the house and on the road, it was a pretty good trip. Overall the boys were very well behaved and happy, though we had our moments of frustration when things just weren't going well, but overall not bad.

Except that we hit a deer.

Yeah, it was a first for us all. While we were in the pass there was a ton of snow on the ground so we were going pretty slow. It was very late so both boys were conked out but because of the snow both Jason and I had our eyes glued on the road and up ahead we saw two deer, one which was on the side of the road and one that was just walking across. We very well couldn't stop despite the fact we were gong pretty slow because it was all snow and ice and that would not have been good on a road with steep banks, no other people on the roads and in the middle of no where, so we just had to keep going at the pace we were at and hope the deer would realize what was going on and stay the heck out of the way.....it didn't. I screamed. Loud. The deer bounced off the hood and onto the side of the road.

Surprisingly the boys didn't wake up from all my screaming and while the bumper front was bowed out a bit, no headlights or anything was broken, so we continued on. Two miles down, the road was perfectly clear. We actually got lucky when we hit it because if it would have been even a bit further we would have been going much faster and I'm sure a lot more damage would have been done and people could have even been hurt.

We eventually arrived very late, but happy to be there at last.

Oh, these were the books Aunt Cheryl and Uncle Monte got for the boys. They were beyond thrilled.