Shuffelin'

Today, Tyler had his conference from about 7am-2pm.  Unfortunately, neither one of us heard the alarm go off, so he woke up about 10 minutes before he was supposed to start his presentation...not showered, not dressed, and not set up with his huge poster and laptop presentation ready to go.  The phone rang about 15 minutes later while he was still quietly scrambling to get organized (me, crossing my fingers that the kids would sleep through it).  Someone asking where Tyler was.  Unfortunately the phone woke Logan up.  11pm bedtime and 7am wake-up is not enough sleep for that boy.  Crabby day!

The kids and I headed downstairs for breakfast (not complimentary!)  Why do expensive hotels not have complimentary breakfasts but a Holiday Inn that only costs $100 does?  What gives?  I am definitely all about the free continental breakfast.  So after we paid to go to the buffet (fortunately they only charged me for one of the kids and myself...which still cost $40!) I headed to the front desk to ask if we could get a late check-out.  Nope.  The best they could do was 12:00.  So we headed back upstairs.  Watched some TV and I showered.  I packed up our room and loaded the luggage cart.  The hotel at least was kind enough to store our luggage for us until Tyler was done in his conference.  And then kids a I checked out of our room and headed to the rooftop to use the pool.  Hoping it wouldn't be a problem that we had already checked out of the hotel.  I was pretty grumpy and a little put-out by the not so convenient super expensive hotel that I'm pretty sure I would have said 'screw you' or something a tad nicer, since my kids were with me.

The rooftop pool was fun, and the kids really enjoyed it.  We ordered lunch from up there (which took an hour to come - 2 grilled cheese sandwiches, fries and a club-house sandwich....really?  An hour?  I'm SO not impressed with this hotel).

Tyler met us up there and we got changed and headed out for our drive back to Pennsylvania.  3pm on a Friday afternoon is not the time to try and get out of Washington DC.  Again, we were without AC and it was stinking hot.  Stop and Go Traffic for 2 hours.  And we only went 50 miles.  The car overheated and the callipers swelled.  We had to pull over and let them cool.  We started smoking and thought we were going to have to bail out of our van at any second.  Fortunately we had a flat of water bottles in the van and Tyler carefully poured the water over the brakes to cool them off.  The water evaporated instantly.  Crazy hot!

He got back in the car and we decided to wait for things to cool down.  We remembered that we hadn't been very good at family prayers and scriptures study while we were on vacation and decided to repent and ask for the Lord's help.  We said a family prayer and asked for safety in driving home.  It was a good experience for our kids.  We got back on the road and decided to head through Delaware to get home, so we could add one more state to our growing list.  The detour proved to be inspirational as we ended up hitting a little rain storm in Delaware just as we were getting dinner that cooled things off nicely.  We were able to drive with some degree of comfort and the van performed great.

We got to Easton Pennsylvania to stay at a beautiful, economical Holiday Inn (with free continental breakfast) for the night before heading to the Crayola factory tomorrow.  Exhausted!  A 3 hour trip ended up taking us 6 hours.  Blah!  The kids were really good about it and didn't complain at all.