Getting Ready

The week before our trip I was dreading leaving my kids for the first time and having no contact with them for the entire trip. My son is a complete cuddle bug who likes to be held a lot. Since I wasn't going to be holding either of my kids for over a week I decided to get them Build a Bears with my voice recorded in the bears. We also went to the zoo and children's museum that week and had planned as a family to go to the Crawdad Festival before my trip, but that didn't work out.

Instead of eating mud bugs, I was delousing our house for head bugs after finding out my nieces had lice. I don't know if that was a final straw to make me grateful for getting out of the house or not, but after washing all the linens, boiling combs and brushes and cleaning the house from top to bottom, I was ready to leave.

As a final family activity we went out for pizza at La Piazza Al Forno after seeing it on Guy's Diner's, Drive-ins and Dives the night before. While we waited for our table we walked across the street for a couple of games of Candyland at the library. After lunch we drove to my parent's house and my dad and I left for Flagstaff. Honestly I was choking back tears as I said good-bye.

There was an orientation in town and then we headed back to the cabin to pack up. I thought we did pretty good packing everything into the dry bags and were successful in getting them to close.