A trip to Grand Island to get a Cadillac. It sounds like a fun trip on the surface. But if you’re reading this and you know our family, you know better than that. Awhile back Austin listed two of our project cars for sale with an “open to trades” listing. One of the projects was traded for $300 and a three wheeler. If you hear that one of our kids lands us a trip to the ER soon, the three wheeler will probably be to blame. The other project that we listed for sale sat a little bit longer and eventually attracted the attention of someone in Nebraska who wanted to offer us a trade. We’d received a few trade options on this vehicle but most of them were lame. This trade peaked our interest. Someone wanted our 1986 Jeep Grand Wagoneer in exchange for their 1954 Cadillac Fleetwood.

We chewed on the idea for a few days and talked about it a few times. In the end, I told Austin I was indifferent about the decision and that it was his call. We used our hotel points to get a free hotel room in Grand Island, Nebraska and made preparations for the trip. Austin picked this particular hotel because it had a hot tub. We have finally developed a good system for traveling now that involves me doing the packing and him doing all vehicle and equipment prep. I don’t feel overwhelmed packing for and traveling with five kids anymore so I think we are becoming a well oiled machine.

The weekend before we left, we borrowed a winch from a friend and Austin spent a few days getting the trailer set up for it. I (and the four boys) helped him load the jeep onto the trailer on Thursday night. Friday we all got up, packed last minute stuff and picked up a grocery order before we hit the road.
Fridays trip went pretty smoothly. We noticed that when we hit the brakes in the van, it pulled to one side. Austin assumed it was a caliper issue that we would fix when we got home. We had one potty accident in the car and didn’t have extra underwear just shorts. That child had to go commando for the rest of the day but he didn’t complain. We also had an “accident” when the life size Spidey doll “peed his pants” towards the end of our drive.

We got to the place that we were going to make the trade and we felt like it was a pretty safe spot so we let the kids out to stretch their legs. We made the trade with no hiccups and were ready to head to our hotel. It was already 8pm when we got checked in and up to our room and the kids were hungry! A lovely group of historians in the hotel lobby offered us some dinner. We took our bags upstairs to our room and Austin started ordering pizza while I took the kids downstairs to have some munchies that were offered to us. We talked to a sweet lady down there until it was time for Austin to go get our pizza across the street. He took two boys with him to pick up pizza and I took two boys upstairs to wait for them to get back.

Austin came back and we started feeding hungry kids at almost 10pm. Austin mentioned to me that we needed to get something for the trailer in the morning. He didn’t make a big deal out of it and I didn’t think anything of it.

Saturday morning we all slept in and we took the boys down to eat breakfast before taking them to the pool to burn some energy. While we were eating breakfast, Austin went out to the van to grab his water cup. When he came back in, he told me that one of the back windows was busted on the van. Thankfully, nothing was missing from the van. We chuckled and reminded ourselves that there’s always something that goes wrong on our roadtrips. The boys were excited to swim and Austin and I were excited for the hot tub. We got everyone downstairs only to find they didn’t have a hot tub anymore. No biggie. We had the whole pool to ourselves and the boys had fun.

We loaded up and were ready to head to a trailer parts store to get what we needed for the trailer. I got the location on my GPS and we headed out. What we thought was a minor issues on the trailer quickly became emergent and we were praying we would make it to the parts store before they closed. My GPS took us to someone’s house instead of the parts store. As we tried to turn around in their driveway the trailer started coming apart in a big way. Austin walked back to the house to see if he could find someone home to at least tell them what was going on and assure them that we would be out of their hair as quickly as we could. He couldn’t find anyone at home so we decided to just get out of there as fast as we could and send them a thank you card when we got home. It was now after 11am and the parts store was only three minutes away but closing at noon. Austin got to work and started figuring out what we needed to do. The boys and I took the van to the parts store while Austin stayed with the trailer. Austin was on speaker phone explaining what he needed when one of the boys told me they needed to go potty. I asked him if he could wait for just a few minutes and he thought he could. He couldn’t. The next time I looked down, he was standing on a wet rug and my heart sank knowing I didn’t have any clean clothes for him in the car. We had used our extra outfit yesterday so I was prepared to dig through the suitcase to find him some swim trunks or a pair of his brothers shorts. Then I remembered that Spidey’s wet clothes from yesterday had been hung to dry at the hotel and had only had water on them so we at least had clean underwear. They may have been two sizes too big and not had any shorts to go with them but they were clean…probably.

We got everything we thought we needed thanks to Amanda at G.I. Trailer and I took everything back to Austin. We quickly realized the part wasn’t the right size for the trailer and we were back to square one. At this point it was 11:55 and I couldn’t make it back to the trailer parts store and we were still parked in someone’s driveway. Austin scratched his head for a minute before deciding to take the new piece that didn’t fit and the old piece that did fit to make a Frankenstein piece that would work. At one point Austin came up to my window with a hand full of bearing grease, a smile on his face and chuckled while asking me “is this what chasin’ your dreams looks like?” After being in the driveway for about two hours, we were ready to hit the road finally.

The boys had been getting restless for awhile and started getting on each other’s nerves. We hadn’t made any progress towards home yet but we already needed to stop. One of the boys immediately fell asleep as soon as we started driving and I knew he needed a good nap. We convinced the other boys to have a beef stick and put their headphones on and we would stop at a restaraunt of their choice in an hour. We made a quick stop to get gas and to run into Walmart to find some clothes for the child still wearing nothing but a T-shirt and Spidey’s undies. The sleeping child woke up and was not happy but we really wanted to get ahead of the storm that was coming because our van was missing a window and no longer weather proof. I offered some more snacks to the boys and we got back on the road. We finally stopped to eat around 3 and let the boys run around the play place for about an hour.

The boys were wound up and ready to be home for the last two hours of the trip. We finally pulled into our driveway around 7pm and all breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Austin and I were frazzled and decided to just let the kids eat in the living room and watch a movie before bed.

I’m slowly coming the realization that quick trips for us will never be quick trips. We will always have some kind of crisis and Austin will always get us out of them. It’s just the way it goes for us. We’ve decided to just embrace it and laugh about it along the way.