Canadian Road Trip

We just got back from a road trip with our three kids.  A very long road trip. I’m talking 40+ hours together in a vehicle.

The reaction that we get from other parents when we tell them about this road trip amuses me. Most people look, if only for just a moment, as if they just threw up in their mouth. And I get that, I do. I’m not saying that there weren’t times during the drive that I didn’t stare longingly out the window at passing airplanes. In fact, at several points during the journey, I seriously contemplated whether I would be critically injured if I jumped from the moving truck and made a break for it.  And on the way home the interior of our truck started to smell suspiciously like goats had been breeding. So, yeah, there were low points.

However, if we had flown to our destination on an airplane we would have missed some pretty cool stuff. My daughter wouldn’t have been able to keep track of how many windmills she saw as we drove through four provinces. We wouldn’t have stopped to take cheesy pictures at The Big Apple in Colborne. My son probably wouldn’t have taught us the words to the I Love My Lips song. We would have missed walking on the ocean floor at the Hopewell Rocks in New Brunswick during low tide. In short, we would have missed seeing a lot of cool stuff across Canada.

Maybe it’s because they have never been on an airplane. Perhaps they are genetically predisposed to behaving well in the car. Maybe my husband bribed them without my knowledge. Whatever the reason, my kids really do well on long car trips. Now that we’re home and have cleaned the layer of crushed fishy crackers and dropped sandwich meat (so that’s what that smell was!) we have already forgotten the moments of lost tempers and sore bottoms. We only remember the good things that our trip to Eastern Canada had to offer.

And we’re already thinking about where our next road trip will take us.

This is an Original Canada Moms Blog post.