Family Adventures

Last Wednesday, my family jumped in the car and took off for the mid-Atlantic, like we've done pretty much the last two or three Memorial Day weekends. We visit MacTroll's oldest brother and his family. We love them to death and miss when we were only an hour away.

The first day of travel took us 8 hours to get to Wheeling, WV. We stole my Aunt Anne's idea from last year and wrapped some presents for him to open every couple of hours on the way out. I also set up an iPod full of family friendly songs. The big motivation though, was booking hotels with swimming pools. When we got to Wheeling it was 4 p.m. We immediately checked in and changed clothes and played in the pool for an hour. X-man also really liked that we were overlooking the Wheeling Jesuit University Track. Oh, if only there had been a way to walk from the hotel down to the facility to use it. Instead, I ended up doing a Zone 1-3 run around the Linley school and up and down the main road. (Cough, hack, cough.)

We left the next morning and drove through the mountains. We were in Pennsylvania for a few minutes then back into West Virginia, then Maryland... then West Virginia. No, we didn't get lost. The state lines are just a wee bit random up there. Finally, we pulled into our friend Rita's driveway. Rita has a slew of kids toys, so we visited for an hour and X-man got to drive the "forbidden" battery-operated jeep. Afterwards we continued on for an hour and a half to MacTroll's brother's.

Since we've been here, X-man has been in heaven playing with his cousins. They've put up with a lot of whining and fussing during his difficult periods. We've played baseball, had water fights, played Legos, investigated new Wii games, tried our hand at some new board games, camped out in the backyard, made s'mores, gone to the Port Discovery Children's Museum, went to the semi-annual sale at Nordstrom's, eaten at the Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang's, road a carousel, picked 22 lbs of strawberries at a local farm, given X-man his first taste of fudge, I ran my first 10k and right now, the gang is extracting gallons of honey from my SIL's bees.

Tomorrow morning after breakfast we'll be piling our stuff back into the car and driving to Columbus, Ohio. We got a room near the Easton Mall, so I can go for a long walk (i.e. window shopping) while X-man and MacTroll take a ride in MacTroll's friend's new convertible mini. There's a pool at the hotel there, too. :-)

Oh, and as for the 10k. It was hot. 85 degrees. I took along my heart rate monitor and it says I was between 175 and 193 beats per minute the entire 1 hour and 11 minutes that I was walogging along. Yes, I was walking for portions and it was that high, and I clearly wasn't trying to break any land speed records. But I finished and then promptly replaced the almost 1,000 calories that I burned with a giant vegetarian lunch at PF Chang's... I really should have picked out that meal before we went to eat there. But I was hungry, really hungry.

Hope all of your Memorial Day Weekend adventures were as fun as ours!