Driving the Family Cross Country  − 24 September, 2005

It was nothing like National Lampoons Vacation. Actually, it was pretty uneventful, if you call paying $1,000 to fix the car 40 miles from my parent's house uneventful.

We did it one day: Appleton, Wisconsin to East Stroudsburg, Pa. (with a little help from my Mom and Dad and some illegal alien-like activity)

At 3 A.M. on Saturday we woke up and started driving. We got to Chicago around 7 A.M., before all the kids woke up which was pretty good. We then started our easterly journey on I-90/I-80 through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. I had to pull over only once on the highway so Chris could yell at the boys for fighting.

We stopped three times for gas too, not too shabby. I would say we got from door to door on about 100$ gas. The real money came when our engine went...

We pulled over for our last time to get gas. As we slowed down I heard a loud schreeching. We pulled into the BP at the Mountaintop exit of I-80 about 20 miles from Pocono Raceway. The van's air conditioner was shredded, unfortunately the vehicle used one single belt so it rendered the vehicle stationary. The mechanic across the street that walked over, that luckily hadn't completely closed up for the night and gone home, said it should not be driven althought they could cut the belt and it would start.

I drove it across the street and parked it outside the garage there. We called my parents and they got the Dodge Ram and drove out to us and picked us up. The kids met my parent's for the first time outside a truckstop of the highway. Definately not the way I pictured it.

Chris got in front and the kids and I laid in the back. We felt like illegal aliens piled in there and we had blankets to lay on and we had to stay down as it's illegal to carry people in the back of the truck.

We finally got to my parent's house around 9 P.M. If it had been an uneventful drive, it would have taken us 15 hours, but it took us 17. I can't imagine what we would have done if our van broke down anywhere else. It wasn't fixed until Tuesday afternoon. My dad and I drove out and picked it up. The next day, we went to NYC as a family and took them up to the Empire State Building.

We lost a few days and a thousand bucks but my mom and dad were able to bond with them a couple days more.