Long Way Home

From Chicago, we had a 17 hour drive home that we split over a period of two days.  It was something I had been dreading all along.  For the majority of the trip we were able to keep most car rides to two, maybe three hours, at a time.  We would drive in the morning, some in the early evening but tried to never drive after dark.  The twins don't sleep in the car so we couldn't pull a few hours off at night while they rested.  Which was fine with us because driving after dark in areas you are unfamiliar with can be scary. 

We drove a good distance from Chicago and stopped in Ohio to get dinner.  We went to yet another Olive Garden!  We didn't have the greatest experience there (think gum and hair in our food) but the manager took care of us and we were on the road again.  It was getting late so we decided to stop for the night sooner rather than later.  We looked up hotels on Priceline in the area...nothing.  That's OK we thought, it's late and sometimes they sell out - we'll just call the hotels directly.  Well two states later (nothing in PA either), 110 hotels called (literally, we counted) and a long drive (we arrived in NY at 3 in the morning) we were finally resting.  Thank God this was our last night.  We were miserable. 

We requested a late check out which was nice because we did sleep in and then we hit the road again.  Driving hours and hours into the night meant that we were that much closer to home.  We had mixed feelings about going home.  Mallory and I both agreed we wanted to stay on vacation - we were having too much fun.  Natalie, Hillary and Rosalie were looking forward to spending a night at Nana Rich's house (something she promised them and they were counting down the days) and Jay was itching to get back to work.  We got home at 7:30 pm and unloaded everything from the car. 

In true Maxwell fashion, (we always, always come home to some sort of animal in the house after vacation) there was a mouse in the kitchen waiting for us.