658

That's how many miles I drove today to start off our annual summer trip.  My kids and I left Abilene, TX this morning at 7am (which was a miracle in itself since that was my scheduled take-off time!).  We drove down Interstate 20, Interstate 30, and arrived at our hotel off Interstate 40 in Memphis Tennessee just before 6pm.   Luckily the skies were clear, the roads were even relatively clear and we had a great day of travel.

Here are a few observations:

My kids are the best travelers ever.  Period.  We were in the car for eleven hours.  We stopped once for lunch at 11:30, where we hung out for an hour at a cool McDonalds featuring touch-screen video games in some of the booths!  We stopped again at a rest area around 4pm to stretch and make a bathroom pit stop.  That's it.  No whining, no fighting, only a few thousand "how many minutes till we get to our hotel?" from K.  They were unbelievable! 

O'Charley's (a place we haven't been to before) has awesome food!  We walked down the street from our hotel to the restaurant and enjoyed a wonderful meal (how I got away with a non-fast food meal on our trip is a mystery!).

My son calls white people "peach".  (The majority of the people in Memphis are black, and while he and K were swimming, he announced "We are the only peach people in here!")

Porsche makes an SUV.  I saw one today.  If you can afford a Porsche, why would you get an SUV? 

My husband is as good (if not better) at packing the car as I am at loading the dishwasher!  My car is loaded down with two golf bags, two suitcases, a tote bag full of shoes, a sleeping bag, two beach chairs, three pillows, a tote bag with swim stuff & beach towels, and our toiletries bags.  And I can still see out my back window!!!  (Don't laugh, but I took a picture of the packed trunk with my cell phone so I can re-pack everything the way it was)

I'm impressed with my SUV's highway gas mileage.  Around town at home I'm lucky to get 19-20mpg.  Today I averaged 27.0, and that's with a loaded-down car!

SiriusXM radio is fantastic.  99% of the time I listen to country music, so I don't need the variety of 250 channels, but the ability to listen to WSIX out of Nashville my entire trip without searching for a good country station is awesome!

I can't wait to see the ocean.

I miss my husband already.