chevy |

A few months ago, we moved to Houston. For reasons I will never understand, this lady called me up and asked me if I wanted to come hang out with her at the auto show.

I did. She had me at Bumblebee*.

That little trip to the auto show turned into a big trip to Dallas about a month later. Well, Grapevine, if you’re going to be persnickety about it.

We don’t know anything about Texas. We’d never set foot anywhere south of Amarillo before we moved here, and we only went to Amarillo to pick up my ex boyfriend who’d decided to drink himself to death in a sketchy road-side hotel room. Fortunately for him, the hotel owner had other plans. Those plans included not having rotten, southern, drunken rock star corpses ruining his good mattresses. ‘Good’ being a very generous term in this case.

By the way, you know your husband loves you when he is willing to drive 12 hours straight to go get your ex boyfriend, then turn right back around and drive 12 more straight hours to get him home. You also know your ex boyfriend is an absolute dick-wad when he never, ever speaks to either of you again. Ever. Not even 7 years later. Not even though he’s totally your friend on Facebook.

Anyway, Donna asked us if we’d like to take a Chevy and drive the 5 hours up to Grapevine to play at Great Wolf Lodge for a weekend. We did. She had me at roadtrip.

We didn’t actually get a “Chevy”, because they’d invited several other bloggers and gave them all the Chevy’s, so poor us got stuck with a Buick Enclave. I know, I know; I don’t know how I survived, either.

We packed the kids up at set off to see this “Texas” place we’d heard so much about. You know what? TEXAS IS BEAUTIFUL. Maybe they’re not too big on putting pesky ‘facts’ in school-books, and maybe there is an Un-american lack of decent Indian food, but good lordy, it’s like candy for your eyeballs.

Well, I thought it was beautiful. My kids were plugged into the Matrix Buick. I’m not even sure they’d realized we weren’t in our house. Oh, wait, they had to have noticed. They could see the floors in the car.

We got to Great Wolf Lodge about noon on a Saturday, and it did not look like this:

You know when you’re in your yard or out taking a walk and you suddenly realize that it’s not a bump you’ve stepped on, it’s a fire ant mount, and in less than half a second, you have creepy little red things climbing all over you and you can’t shake your legs fast enough to get them off and you’re pretty sure you’re about to die a slow, painful death at the hands of pint-sized mercenaries? It was exactly like that.

But in the awesome way. The boys took on the big waterslides and I took the girl to the kiddie pool, where she learned the hard way that no matter how cute you are, I will not, in fact, let you squirt the babies in the eyes with water guns.

{Before, and after. Oh how fickle the heart of a four heart old.}

We played so hard, for so long, that we were all passed out dead asleep by 9:30. That’s, like, 8 hours before my husband’s bedtime. We staying in the Kid Kamp Suite, which was totally cool except we had three kids, and it sleeps two, so there was an Epic Battle to the Death for bed space. We had plenty of room for a kid on the grown up side of the room, but the grown up side didn’t have anything you could climb up and get stuck on, and did did have grown ups. Ewww, parents.

The next day, we sent to boys off to get their geek on while we took the girl to Vegas. You think I’m kidding.

I would tell you how much money my husband dumped into slots at the arcade, but I’m only on, like, the 2nd phase of grief over it, and I just don’t want to acknowledge what happened to my wallet that day. Sufficed to say, a good time was had. By all. Especially the house.

Our boys grabbed Jess’ son and they went out with some hard, wand-hitting Magi’s to go to work on the treasure chests in that lodge.

The game is called MagiQuest, and it is loosely defined as, ‘You pay something close to $75 for 3 wands, but what you’re really paying for is 4 hours of peace and quiet, because it will p0wn your kids.’ We didn’t see them again until they’d completed every level of the MagiQuest, which takes them up and down 8 levels of staircases in the hotel, which is so not something I’m even brave enough to think about doing with them.

My love, she has limits.

I decided to take my daughter for a pedicure instead. Because I like to instill really expensive obsessions in my children during their tender years, that’s why. Also because the spa is a parent-free zone, so hello 30 minutes totally alone. Which I totally spent outside the door of the spa. Because I’m an idiot.

And then we drove home, and I didn’t have to kill my husband even once. Mostly because of the Marriage Saver feature that comes standard on all Buicks. Except the one Tiger drove. Bygones.

And my kids didn’t have to maim each other, not even once. Mostly because of they didn’t have to acknowledge the other ones existed the whole way home. Which, really, just takes the sport out of the whole ‘Family Roadtrip’ thing. I swear…modern technology is denying our children their childhood.

Angst.

That’s not an adaptor. That is the normal old wall plug, right in the console of the car. This? Changed my life.

So, my less-than ten point summary is this:

It was really fun.
The buffet restaurant is better than the sit-down restaurant.
Stay overnight if you can.
Bring cash if you do.
Do NOT test out a new feminine hygiene product on your trip.
The car was wicked awesome.
If you tell your husband that driving a car is like fucking the highway, he’s going to look at you a little differently for the rest of your life.
It’s totally worth it.
So long as you stay on top.

*I made my family stand in line on opening day for the Transformers movie, and then I wept at its awesomeness. And that is not a theological statement.