WSOP Road Trip Day 2

Objectives: Drive approximately seven hours from Pittsburgh to Hoosier National Forest, where we’d camp for the night.

An Early Morning

Upon telling people about this trip, Jerica and I were both bombarded with advice about long drives with kids. Much of it would have required more planning than we were able to do, but one bit that stuck out was to try to do as much driving as possible while the kids were asleep. I’m not great at sleeping in the car or during the day, and we didn’t want to turn the trip into a complete slog, so we didn’t go the extreme route of driving all night and taking turns napping.

We did, however, wake up at 5AM, pack up the car, and carry children half-asleep out to their car seats. This ended up buying us only about an hour of quiet driving time, but that was something, and driving through Western Pennsylvania as the sun rose was a nice experience.

There were a number of reasons why my girlfriend Emily, who is also quite close with my cousin’s family, was not able to join us for this trip. It’s unfortunate, though, because she is an exceptional trip planner.

Thankfully, she was willing and eager to serve as a consultant, emailing us options and ideas for each day of the drive. She found a good-looking breakfast spot and an Ohio state park with a playground at the same exit, about 3.5 hours into our drive, which was perfect.

Or so it seemed. The restaurant was inexplicably closed. The kids were hungry and antsy. So was I. Oliver wanted McDonald’s. Henry wanted pancakes, but not McDonald’s pancakes. I think partly he just didn’t want Oliver to get what he wanted, but I also didn’t want McDonald’s. We ended up going to both a McDonald’s and a donut shop, which pleased everyone except Jerica, who wanted her boys to eat real food. I offered to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when we got to the park, but I was the only one who ended up eating one.

The conflict over breakfast was resolved as soon as we got to the state park. It was perfect, with a large open field, shady picnic tables, and two big playgrounds. As we walked over from the parking lot, two big hawks flew screeching over our heads, to everyone’s delight. The kids wolfed down their breakfasts and ran to play while Jerica and I discussed the next leg of the day’s drive.

Golf to the Rescue

With the kids now fully awake and their appetites for running around whetted, the afternoon drive was a tough one. These are not indoor kids. They grew up on farms. They don’t own a television, and although they both like books, sitting quietly is not really their bag.

Even the oldest, Henry, wasn’t a good enough reader to try to spot license plates from different state, so we started with a game called “Count the Red Cars”, which went over pretty well. “Maybe Ollie will learn to count past ten,” Jerica joked.

“I KNOW ELEVEN!” the four-year old screamed indignantly.

His older brother kept the count as everyone pointed out red vehicles. “Thirty-eight, thirty-nine,”

“Thirty-ten!” Oliver injected as a red convertible roared past.

That game was a hit, but then Oliver wanted to play “Count the White Cars” which proved overwhelming and ultimately lost everyone’s interest.

At our last stop, in an effort to reduce fighting, we’d rearranged the car seats so that the baby was between Henry and Oliver. Now, when we permitted them to take out the portable DVD player for the first time (the kids’ parents have largely resisted electronic entertainment, especially of the each-person-zoning-out-in-front-of-his-own-personal-screen sort, but all the stops were coming out for this trip), this presented a new challenge, as it was difficult to put the player in a spot where both boys could see it.

I temporarily resolved this problem by installing Angry Birds on my phone and passing it back so that one could play that while the other watched a DVD. All was well for about half an hour, when Oliver suddenly announced that he felt sick. I pulled off on the shoulder of the highway and his mother scrambled to get him out of the car. Ultimately it passed without incident, she found a plastic bag to keep near him, and we forbade him any more time staring at screens. Of course, this meant we couldn’t let his older brother watch or play anything either, lest jealousy and fighting ensued. Back to the drawing board.

With backseat restlessless approaching critical levels, we exited the highway for a random state park. We were flying blind here, it wasn’t one that Emily had researched, but luck was on our side. The first thing we saw as we entered the park was a miniature golf course!

Honestly, not a lot of golfing took place. Walter just wanted to play with the brightly colored balls, and his older brothers were more interested in using little hills as ramps to launch balls into the air than in patient and disciplined pursuit of the hole. Still, a good time was had by all, with Oliver providing a great example of golf’s power to elicit a range of emotions from intense frustration to ecstatic triumph. After golfing, we found a pavilion near a lake where I made sandwiches while Jerica took the kids down to the waterside.

Where to Sleep?

It was still relatively early when we reached Hoosier National Forest, and two of the kids were asleep, so we decided to push on. Soon they were all asleep and we were finally able to make some progress. It was nice also to have a chance to talk one-on-one with Jerica. As much time as I’ve spent with their family, I’m most often playing with the kids or talking with my cousin, and I soon realized just how little his wife and I knew about each other.

Around 11:30, we’d just reached St. Louis and were ready to stop for the night. This was when our first real conflict arose. It was late, and the nearest campgrounds would all require driving at least half an hour out of the way in each direction. The St. Louis airport offered an overwhelming selection of airports, but all seemed expensive or sketchy or both. Basically, we were presented with three options:

1. Drive an hour or more out of our way to camp.

2. Pay $60 – $80 for a low-end motel.

3. Pay $150+ for a clean, quiet, and safe place.

This seemed to be Jerica’s preference, and I was open to it, but there were limits to how low I was ready to go, especially with the kids. Reviews mentioned some pretty concerning things: used condoms in stairwells, loud arguments in adjacent rooms, etc. I vetoed one place that was directly adjacent to a SuperFund clean-up site.

As much as I joke about being a nit, I do find it nice to have disposable income for situations like this, where I can buy my way out of a certain level of discomfort or inconvenience. I wasn’t thrilled about paying so much for a night that was supposed to cost us $14, but I was willing to consider it an option on the table.

I was going to pay for the more expensive option myself, because I knew it wasn’t something Jerica would otherwise consider, and because it was my, for lack of a better word, snobbishness that made this prefereable to our options. She seemed uncomfortable with this, though, I think because in her eyes I was already doing her a big favor just by coming on the trip and she didn’t like the idea of my paying a lot of money out of pocket on top of it. So then she was saying that she would pay for a more expensive place and I was saying let’s keep looking for a tolerable cheaper place and we were generally driving back and forth and being indecisive and waking up the kids.

Finally I found a reasonably reviewed Econolodge for $68, including tax. As we pulled into the parking lot, we passed a bunch of Hispanic women and children sitting around in a circle in a parking spot eating and talking. My first reaction was that this made the place seem shady to me, but Jerica exclaimed, “Those are my people!” so I went ahead and parked the car and walked into the office to get us a room.

A white man in his forties was checking in ahead of me, and I got a weird vibe from him. His movement was a bit frenetic, he paid in cash, and there was something else I could put a finger on. At some point another guy ran in, offered him some money which was refused, and then darted back out. When they left, the very friendly clerk agreed that they seemed a little shady but assured me that there was a police station just across the street. I got a really nice vibe from him and emerged from the office declaring, “I’ve got a good feeling about this!”

“I don’t,” Jerica laughed. “I just got propositioned.”

Apparently she’d been standing near the car (the kids were asleep inside) when a man, most likely one of the guys checking in ahead of me, walked up to her and asked where she was staying and what she was “up to”. It didn’t sound like he was at all threatening, just skeazy, and she wasn’t too shaken by it, but I regretted leaving her and the kids alone in the parking lot.

The place was pretty rundown but otherwise fine. We had no further problems, the kids slept like logs, and a few of us even got in hot showers. Even though we’d spent the previous night in my apartment, we hadn’t used the shower because it had already been cleaned for the next tenants; I also hadn’t showered at their house the night before, so this was part of my preference for a hotel/motel over camping.