Traveling with Children

I always say that you can do anything while traveling with children, you just can't do everything! Unfortunately, I seem to have forgotten my own motto. Consequently, we've overdone it a bit trying to see way too much. The result is some sulky behavior and some exaggerated yawning from the backseat. Tonight, to compensate, we tried to make an effort to get to the hotel earlier so that everyone could relax. We did manage to get here (Bluff, UT) by 5:30 pm, so everyone had a chance to play legos, read and swim. We wanted to get here by 4:00, but couldn't resist Canyon de Chelly (well worth the trip).

My motto's true for letterboxing as well. You can do any box, you just can't do every box. We've been picking and choosing boxes as we go, but today I totally blanked out on one of Sprite's in Ganado, AZ. We were at the spot, I had the clues in the car, and somehow I just had a moment of brainfreeze and forgot about the box. 10 miles down the road when I remembered, my husband offered to go back, but really turning back is hard to do on a car trip.

Anyway, we had a number of things planned for tomorrow, but.....my youngest threw up shortly after getting out of the pool. This may put a hitch in the activities. That's the other part of traveling with kids...unexpected emergencies. I travel with a full medicine chest which gets used more than you can believe. My youngest fell down at Pit Park in Deming NM (cool letterbox there) and scraped both knees; my oldest fell down a slippery slope at an abandoned mine and scraped both his knees (they match!). Today, they were both trying to look through the spotting scope at petroglyphs at the same time and bumped heads, leading #1 to cut his lip....and so on.

Oh well, some of the best vacations I can remember from being a kid are when disaster struck. Like the flash flood in Mesa Verde that caused a hillside of mud come down into our tent and screened-in fly (resulting in a hotel stay). Or, the time when it was so cold camping in Canada that we were just huddled around the campfire afraid to move. When the people from Saskatoon left because it was too cold (and they were in a camper too), that gave us permission to skip out too (another Holiday Inn). That said, we're heading for Mesa Verde tomorrow...I'd prefer no flash floods.