Across the Country in 7 Days

So, last entry was in LA and now I'm sitting in Palm Beach Florida. The two mighty oceans serving as bookends to one heck of a week:) That almost bordered on poetic, and you were starting to think I was fairly illiterate based on the amount of typos usually found in my posts:)

Anyways, it was one heck of a week. And in order to tell it all I'll break it up into chapters.

Chapter 1: Phoenix

We started off our 45 hour drive by tackling the six hour drive to Phoenix. As I've mentioned previously Danny's brother Boyd and his family live down there and there is also a TPC (Tournament Players Club?) or a course for Danny to practice on as well as being the headquarters for PING (Danny's sponser) so it just made sense to stop there for a while. It ended up being even better because Mom and Dad Summerhays came down to visit as well. During the day the boys and I hung out with Grandma Summerhays, Barbara Jean (Boyd's wife) and their kids while Danny, Lynn (Danny's dad) and Boyd practiced.

Some of our highlights include playing in the bounce house in front of the motor home, going to the McCormick Railroad Park and riding on the train as well as the carousel, playing at Boyd and Barji's neighborhood playground and having lunch at Chick-fil-a almost every day. Life is good! Our last evening there the dads watched the kids and Mom, Barji and I had a girls night out with pedicures and dinner. So fun!!

Chapter 2: Phoenix to Houston

We left Phoenix on Thursday afternoon and set out on our 18 hour segment of the drive towards Houston. The big event of that night was Jack's "tummy ache" that turned into a night of dashing for the bowl as soon as I heard Jack moan "mommy". Any parent will understand the plight it was just accentuated by our being in such tight quarters and by driving into the wee hours of the night. Fortunately it seemed to be just something he ate because the next morning he was very happily sipping back on his 7-up and pedialyte and didn't have any other issues:) We ended up stopping in a Wal Mart parking lot in Ft. Stockton, TX (the only Wal Mart for hundreds of miles. There isn't a whole lot going on in Western Texas for any who didn't already know this) and driving the rest of the way to Houston the next morning.

Chapter 3: Houston

We had a short but action-packed Friday night and Saturday morning with the Diehl family (Danny's sister Mary and her family). In true Cousin Eddie style (see Christmas Vacation) we backed all 45 feet of our bus into their driveway and plugged in to one of their outlets. Although we took over the whole driveway and hung out into the road a bit, I know deep, deep down inside the neighbors thought we were pretty cool:) Jack and Patton had a blast running around with their cousins and we got to catch up with Mary and Mike. Saturday morning they took us out on a lake by their house in their canoe which was tons of fun. However the fun was short lived since we were now to Saturday and still had another 18 hours to Palm Beach.

Chapter 4: Houston to Palm Beach

We drove...alot... and then drove some more:) While the stops definitely broke up the 45 hours a ton, in the end it was still 45 hours on the road. We still managed to have fun though by reading books, watching movies, playing play dough, coloring and watching more movies. We stopped at a Walmart in DeFuniac Springs, Florida and went to church there the next morning (In DeFuniac Springs not Walmart:)). After church we hit the road again and drove all the way into Palm Beach. We got in about 8:30 (about 1 hour before our eta thanks to Danny's amazing driving skills) and got set up once again for another week.

So while it was a ton of driving it was so nice to have a little more low key week without having the stress of a tournament. We spent some fun time with extended family as well as a lot of quality time with just the four of us... the road warriors as we like to call ourselves:) Anyhow, we are now safe in Florida and will let you know how it goes next week. Til then...