Firstly, we were picking up our daughter from camp (wrote about that here), which meant that we woke up at first light of dawn, threw all the other kids in the van, and pulled out of the driveway around 7:05 a.m. This feat, in and of itself, is sort of amazing.
The campground is about two and half hours away from our house, hence the early start, and neither of us had been there before since my daughter carpooled down there on Monday (we just had to drop her off at church). We don't have GPS, so we were relying on my wife's hand-written directions from Google maps (printing stuff at our house is sort of annoying - the printer's in the basement, you have to make sure there's an extension cord to plug it in, etc.).
Well, at one point, near the end of our journey we unknowingly missed a turn, because, as we found out on the return trip, the road sign was completely covered by a tree branch. Once we thought we weren't on the right road, we stopped at a gas station and bought a map and asked the cashier, and it turns out that although we were not on the correct road, we were still not too far from our destination. We had only lost a few minutes.
So, after everyone used the bathroom and got a snack, we made it to the camp, still in time to see the closing presentation/ceremony. And we got this girl back, who had had an awesome time:
After this, everyone was starving, and so we stopped at an A&W diner fast food place which we'd never been to before and got some hot dogs, french fries, and root beer floats (I guess this was our fancy dinner?). And we drove by the NY Jets Training camp.
My wife thought that we should stop (although she doesn't even like to watch football that much, she just thought that it might be interesting), but we didn't. Let's just say I probably would have if I had four boys, but the girls declared it to be boring. They're probably right, anyway. But first, we drove through the town of Caroline, and so my wife made me pull over and she took this picture:
Then, we drove to the next fun thing, which was Barnes & Noble (the same one I wrote about in this post). My wife loves this time of year at B&N because it's when they have a whole lot of clearance stuff. We got the girls notebooks (they love anything to write in), and I got a book and she got a bag and mostly everything was 75% off. Oh, and we found the board game Catan Junior for $6, which the older girls will be able to play. Then, we got coffee and a couple of snacks because we still had an hour or so drive ahead of us to our house.
We ended the day with a relaxed dinner of cheese and crackers, watermelon, and steak while the girls watched some American Girl movie from Redbox. After the kids went to bed the wife and I watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (which we got for 99 cents on VUDU).
A road trip, a new restaurant, random photo ops, clearance stuff at Barnes & Noble, and cheap movies... it was a memorable and spontaneous anniversary, although maybe a little unconventional. But who wants to be conventional in life? Doesn't that get a little boring sometimes?
It sounds like a typical day and anniversary in the life of a young couple with children - four!!!
ReplyDelete