Head Out on the Highway...

Here's the view from the front seat for the next week:

The Husband looks a bit disgruntled here. He off-loaded the "load the iPod" responsibility to someone else, and The Essential Leonard Cohen is not what he had in mind.

The Girl is doing some hardcore Baum-ing with The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Please do not let your eye linger on that tell-tale golden-arched box beside her. The only time we let them have Happy Meals is when we're leaving on a road trip - for true!

The Boy is watching "The Muffets" - not so much a second-generation hip-hop musical version of a nursery rhyme, but more a mistaken swapping of F's for P's.

Yep, the PM family is out on the open road, following that time-honoured tradition of the Summer Holidays Driving Trip. We've never actually taken a trip with the kids anywhere other than from here to Canada (something The Girl tearfully reminded me the other day, protesting that "some of my friends have been to DisneyWorld five times and I've never been ANYWHERE!").

I loved road trips as a kid. Well, I love my memories of them, which is the point, right? We often hiked out to the left coast to see family, and I remember how ah-MAY-zing it was to stay in a hotel (pools! cable! coffeemakers in the bathroom!). I remember the excitement of eating in restaurants Every Single Meal (more often than not, the Golden Arches). I remember stopping at various tourist money-sucking traps attractions and overloading on kitsch and tacky souvenirs.

So far, no fighting, good sleeping, and nothing lost. Clearly, this state of affairs in entirely unsustainable and I give it another hour or two before it descends into irritable, dirty, sticky children and grim-faced parents admonishing their brood to Sit Down and Be Quiet so we can Have FUN! We've carb-loaded on stale continental breakfast, hit the 4ft x 8ft hotel pool (complete with murky lukewarm hot tub) and are now waiting out the rain so we can slosh around in the leftover mud at the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum.

In other words, a perfect start.