Yesterday, we left at about 2pm to head down to Florida. We got a late start mainly because we had been up late the night before and needed our sleep. Our trip took 2 hours longer than expected due to nightmare traffic!! The moment we got on the interstate about a mile from the house, we came to a dead standstill and traffic crawled from that point on for 2 hours before it opened up. As you can imagine, the stress level began to rise. It didn’t help that the kids kept saying “go faster, go faster.”
Right away Kristine wanted to sleep so she stretched out and put her legs across the back seat over Olegs’ lap. Of course, he didn’t appreciate it so the yelling and shoving match started. This was one of many that took place due to each kid’s invasion of the other’s personal space. So picture yelling and shoving going on in the midst of a traffic jam. For a moment Robert and I even contemplated returning home and forgetting the whole trip. Obviously, we couldn’t do that so we pressed on.
Once traffic opened up, it got better and we all relaxed. Both kids figured out a way to stretch out in the backseat without bothering each other. We made the mistake of leaving the food in the back where they could get to it. Seemed like every few minutes we heard another wrapper being opened and the sound of them gobbling up more fruit rollups and cereal bars. When we stopped we moved the food up front so we could control things.
Our first Florida stop was at my parents’ house near Tallahassee. When Kristine got out of the car, the first thing she wanted to know was which way the beach was. My parents live way out in the country and their house is surrounded by forest land and horse pastures so it looks a lot different than the beach scenes the kids expected. Kristine said, “This isn’t Florida, this is Australia.”
Luckily, there is a beach nearby so today we took them for a swim. We would have never heard the end of it otherwise. The weather was chilly and the water was ice cold but that didn’t matter to them. It was funny to see the locals walking by all bundled up while Olegs and Kristine frolicked in the water. There were a couple of guys out in a fishing boat near shore and we could hear one of them say in his country drawl, “I don’t think they’re from around here.” It was pretty funny.
My parents have friends next door who have some beautiful Arabian horses so we also got to visit with them. We fed them treats and brushed and pet them. Kristine is a horse lover like me so we could pet them all day. The highlight of the day, however, was the Kawasaki Mule. It’s a rugged 4X4 golf cart that the kids got to drive. They took turns driving up and down the property and had a blast. That’s all they wanted to do the whole time. Kristine almost ran us into an electric fence on her first driving attempt but after that she was fine as long as Robert was sitting next to her and able to grab the wheel at a moment’s notice. Olegs was a pro the whole time.
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