Over Memorial Day weekend we took our first ever driving vacation as a family. I mean a thought out, planned, we're going to drive more than four hours to get somewhere driving vacation. Charlie doesn't really like to drive very much, but since we don't have flight benefits anymore and we have to be a little more selective where we fly, driving it is.
It's not like we've never driven anywhere. We drove from Dallas to Denver (although we both swear we never want to do that again) and we have done Dallas to Austin or San Antonio because it would often take the same amount of time to get to the airport, get checked in, wait on the plane and fly as it would to just do the drive. I also did back and forth between Detroit and Chicago with the kids last summer, but we've never actually picked a vacation destination with the sole intent to get there by car.
It was just a three day weekend and we didn't go that far. Mount Rushmore, a seven to eight hour drive. Remember we were going to go there over Labor Day weekend except that it was closed due to the government shutdown? I know a lot of people have already forgotten about that shutdown, but not me because it ruined my vacation plans. Don't mess with my vacations. So we left on Friday night and drove about three to four hours and then got up the next morning and drove some more. It really wasn't bad. Kind of boring, but not bad.
We stopped somewhere in Nebraska to see Carhenge, a little version of Stonehenge made out of cars. It was cute and a good place to stretch our legs. It was kind of lost on the kids but they thought it was cool anyway. We made it to our hotel near Mount Rushmore in the late afternoon so got unpacked, had a s'more on the fire pit in the back (the kids did, Charlie and I passed) and then went to see the night lighting ceremony at Mount Rushmore.
The next day we were going to do alpine sledding and miniature golf after we went to "Bear Country" and made our way through the drive through zoo with lots of bears and other wildlife, but there was a torrential downpour that prevented all that fun. Instead we just went back to Mount Rushmore to check out the exhibit hall and find out a little more about it and then headed home.
Not really a rip roaring vacation, but somewhere we wanted to go and now we don't need to go back for a very long time. My parents took me when I was a kid but I was pretty small and it was definitely different than I remember. That could be due to renovations or it could just be that my memory stinks and I have no idea what I saw when I was that little. I don't know that we will be doing another driving vacation soon, but at least we know we can handle it and there's some pretty interesting, random stuff out there to see.
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