This past Sunday, my wife took our four children on a trip to see her Dad and his wife at their Alabama condo on the beach.
And I stayed home.
I stayed home to save some vacation time, to keep the house from freezing solid, to feed the cat and hamster, to bring in the mail and paper and to volunteer at the Cleveland Boat Show. (I think all but the first of those could have been hired out.) Oh, and a honey-do list a mile long.
I ended up doing all of those except about three-quarters of the honey-do list because of the HDD failure in my MacBook. But I digress.
So my wife drove these kids the thousand miles to Gulf Shores, Alabama and my kids drove my wife crazy. Well, not quite, but close.
So I was called in to chauffeur them back. Not the whole way (since very little flies into Gulf Shores that we could find), but from Birmingham, at the end of a long-ish Southwest flight. So while they did a full 2,000 miles in a week, I only did 1,400 miles. In 38 hours. On Saturday, I was up by 4:30 am, on a Greater Cleveland RTA westbound #32 by 5:43 am, on a westbound #66/redline by 6:02 am and through Cleveland Hopkins airport security by 6:52 am. (They didn't care that I only had a sandwich bag and not a liter bag for my toiletries!) By 7:00 am I had started my first cup of coffee and was wishing I'd figured out the ATT/Starbucks free wireless password before I'd left. At 7:38 we were lining up for Nashville.
I had to change planes in Nashville so I decided to sit close to the front in an aisle seat. This meant sitting next to a mom with an infant. Turns out she's got two 7-week old twins and a three-year old (the others were with her sister in the previous row). We had some fun conversation for a while, I read for a while, I napped for a while and then we landed. Barely a peep from the two twins the entire trip. The other kid, well, he's got issues (appropriate for his age) with sitting still for 90 minutes!
By 9:42 am (all times Eastern), we were on the ground in Nashville and I was looking for more coffee. Starbucks there was still in the T-Mobile network and had lines out the door so I didn't get any coffee or free wireless. So I ate some of the scones I'd made Friday and wished for coffee.
Bumped into a mom and son traveling from Cleveland and we chatted for a bit. Posted a picture of the cool wing on the plane at the next gate and by 11:04 am we were on the plane to Birmingham and on the ground by 12:04 pm. By 1:04 pm we were all reunited and had diverted to the Museum of Southern Flight where we got caught up on our Tuskegee Airmen history and saw this cool replica of our/Ohio's very own Wright Flyer.
After that was a long drive to Bowling Green, Kentucky (where I happen to know the location of the near-highway Starbucks from our trip to Mississippi for our Katrina relief trip). After a night in Bowling Green, we were off again. Very slowly, with four children.
The snow started in Cincinnati and let up a few times but the temperature kept dropping. Soon we were in Cleveland and home by 8:30 pm Sunday.
It was good to get everyone home.
