New Year's in Shreveport

Wow... I feel pretty rested today. It's Friday, and I've just recovered from our trip to Shreveport last weekend! Too much fun all at once, I guess!

New Year's Day the office where I work is always closed, so since it was Friday we decided to take a day of vacation and make a 4-day weekend out of it. So we loaded up in the car and headed down to Shreveport! My Grandpa, Uncle and Aunt live there, and we keep trying to find chances to go visit. They've only got a chance to see Hannah once, about a year ago, so we knew she wouldn't probably even remember them. Gotta get the kids exposed to the Fam, right?

Well, she certainly exposed us to something. Tulsa to Shreveport is about a 6-hour drive if you don't stop, but we generally stop around Paris, Texas (which is roughly 3 hours from either end of the trip) for a break and usually a meal at McD's or somewhere. We stopped to eat a clown-burger and get some Happy Meals with talking chipmunks in them, got a potty break/diaper change, let the kids play for a few, then headed on out. Well, the late lunch plus the long car ride plus the afternoon sun flashing through the bare tree trunks was apparently too much for poor Hannah... about an hour or so after we left Paris TX, she gave us her lunch back.

So we were in a dilemna... two hours from our destination and a car seat full of something you don't really want to smell for two hours! We stopped at the first gas station we saw, and while Cathy took Hannah into the bathroom and changed her clothes and rinsed the fouled ones out in the sink, I stood there in the parking lot with some paper towels and tried to get as much of the stuff out of the car seat as I could. Then we sat Hannah on a blanket we were willing to sacrifice for the evening and drove to the closest Dollar General, where we bought a huge bottle of their generic version of Febreze, took the baby out of the seat, and sprayed it down, then sat her back down on the blanket again. Miraculously, although everything was still damp, our field cleaning job did the trick well enough that we smelled very little on the rest of the trip. Hannah was never sick after that, and none of the rest of us had any queasiness, so we figure it was motion sickness (as opposed to a virus or food poisoning). Even so, I'll bet it's a while before Cathy wants to stop at that McD's again!

We had a terrific time on the weekend. Grandpa's great; he gets tired easily, still gets his bouts of upset stomach, and keeps the house unbelievably hot in winter (the thermometer on the thermostat said 85 degrees one time that I checked!), but we love him so much. My Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Elaine hung out with us for a big part of the weekend, too, and they're always fun. This trip they took us to the Norton Art Gallery, which I've always heard about but never remember visiting. Grandpa loves to go out to eat, so we went out to Cracker Barrel (sort of a favorite for our family when we're on trips) and one of Grandpa's favorite places, which Uncle Jimmy calls "The Green Weenie". We missed my cousin Derick again this time; he was unavailable this time and last for different reasons, but I'm sure we'll get to see him again eventually!

We got to visit with some old friends of mine this time... we went over to Tom & Pam's house for some ferocious Wii playing with them and their two boys (Mikey especially liked the Monster Truck racing game they have, in which you basically crush everything you can see until you get tired of crushing stuff). This time we also made it out to a service at my church there, Word of Life Center, and ran into several people... Chad Giddens, Glen Ware, even Tom's sister Lisa (who I didn't recognize at first because she was like 16 the last time I saw her, and that was a LONG time ago!) We saw Chad's wife Dixie, up on stage during the music portion of the service, but we didn't get to talk to her, or Pastor Sam and Becky Carr either, although Dixie told me later on Facebook that she and Becky had spotted us from the stage and Becky told her an embarrassing story about me from when I was a teenager. :)

It was a great weekend; no puking occurred on the way home (although we did eat at Taco Bell and not McD's!) and we didn't even see any of the snow until after we got off the Indian Nations Turnpike. We're hoping to make this at least a twice-yearly trip for us instead of just this annual thing we seem to have fallen into, so it won't be long before we do it again!