Road Trip

This road trip is going to be much different that I originally planned. Months ago I received a "Save the Date" for Brice's wedding (the son of my former boss, Junior). I watched Brice grow up thru his high school and college years and he was like a little brother to me. I was so excited when I started making plans to go to his wedding.

Mike is heading to his hunting lease for opening deer season (archery), so it's just me and the boys heading to Kansas. Originally I'd planned to leave yesterday. I was going to visit my friend, Kelly, in OKC on my way to Sterling where I'd stay with the Chris & Teri. Today I had planned to go to Lyons to visit some old friends at Iron Works. Tomorrow is the wedding and RaeAnn and I were going to carpool (giving us some time to talk because we know that it'll be hard to talk while chasing kids at the wedding/reception). Then Sunday I was going to go to church at SEBC before heading to St. John. Nancy, the boys and I were going to take pizza to Great-Grandma K's for dinner and then we'd spend the night at Nancy's house. On Monday the boys and I would drive back to Texas.

Did you notice that most of the last paragraph was in the past tense? Well...that's because those were my plans...until Teri called on Wednesday night. I was busy finishing laundry and packing when I saw that I'd missed a call from her. She said that Hans had a fever and she suspected the H1N1 virus. *Screeeeech!* My plans were suddenly put on hold while I tried to figure out an alternative. I'm not usually a germ-a-phobe, but it just isn't using good common sense to knowingly expose me and the boys to such a contagious virus. After talking with Mike about several different scenarios, we finally decided that I should just go to Wichita for the wedding. I was sad that I wouldn't get to do all the other fun stuff...but the original reason that I was going to KS was for Brice's wedding, so these plans will have to do!

The boys and I loaded up the car and left this morning around 8:30 am. I was glad to be on the road...and just a little nervous about how the boys would travel.

Before we left I picked out a park to stop at for lunch using the OKC parks website. My main requirement was a park just off I-35 that had a playground. They described Diggs Park as a 20+ acre park with 5 picnic areas, a baseball diamond, playground, pool and pool house, community center, and 3 basketball courts. Sounds great, right? What they didn't say was that this park was built in the 1950's...and hasn't been updated since then! We pulled up to see the playground:

What? You can't see it? Let me give you a close up of the "big" slide.

There were 2 metal slides and a swing set. The pool looked like it has been closed for at least 15 years. The 5 "picnic areas" were 5 different picnic tables spread out over the 20 acres. The community center was a pre-school that wasn't in session. The baseball diamond was a backstop in the grass by the woods. The 3 basketball courts were 3 backboards with rims nailed to poles in the parking lot!

The good thing is that a 3 year old and a 1 year old don't need all the fancy stuff to make them happy. Barrett was happy eating his peanut butter sandwich.

Brody was happy running. He had LOTS of pent up energy to get out, so he decided to run to the entire opposite side of the park and back. There was a fence at the other side and a retirement home across the street, so I felt pretty safe staying at the picnic table with Barrett and watching Brody run.

He was ready to take his sweatshirt off when he got back!

Then he was ravenous! He inhaled the 6 chicken nuggets in just a few minutes.

Neither one of the boys was very excited when I told them that it was time to get back on the road. Brody did pretty good (besides asking, "Can you see KS yet?" every few minutes) and he took a long nap ("so that we'll get there faster!"). Barrett alternated between napping and crying. I think it really frustrated him that he couldn't turn over to his tummy to sleep!

We made it to the hotel around 3:30 pm and were greeted with 44 mph gusts of wind. I felt like the wind was screaming at us, "Welcome back to Kansas!"