On the road

We're three - or is it four? - days into our cross country trek. The kids are doing great. The drive has been lovely, even when the weather hasn't been so great. Driving with the three of them by myself is not anywhere near as bad as I'd feared. The DVD player isn't going full-time, and there have been long stretches where there isn't a single video game in play. Audiobooks and a license plate spotting app on the iPhone (Spotters) have kept kids far more entertained than I'd imagined.

We're up to 32 states, including one of the two we never thought we'd see. When we were climbing out of the van at the Riverfront parking in Saint Louis the other morning, what should pull up in the opposite space but a suburban with Alaska plates. That was number 20, I think. We hit 25 states before crossing into Kansas, which meant it was time to stop at DQ for blizzards. Next milestone is 40 states, which we'll probably hit by the time we get into Denver.

I have no idea what's going on in the world, but I can discuss in detail the little details which make Artemis Fowl an amazingly fantastic and super cool evil kid genius, along with his progression to amazingly fantastic and super cool not-exactly-evil kid genius. We're listening our way through the first three books of the series, since they were bedtime reading a few years ago. Books four & five were more recent, so we'll be able to skip forward after this to the latest in the series, The Time Paradox.

There's a lot of photos stored on the cards of the two cameras the kids are using to document the trip. Shots from Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and Kansas - but I'm just not quite up to getting out all the cables and chargers tonight. These are a few of the shots from the iPhone. I'm on the Dell, so the photos are as-is...

Heading through Tennessee, somewhere north of Nashville. The kid who's a fan of big construction projects and anything to do with cars and motoring loved driving all the miles on roads cut through the rock.

Heading over to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The kids had seen photos, and had heard about it when I read The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson jumps out of the Arch during a fiery battle with a monster from Greek mythology), but the size of the actual thing outdid the image they'd built in their heads. It's been about 30 years since the last time I'd been up in the arch, so it was fun to go as an adult.