180 Miles to Milton and Back

O.....M......G. Traveling with kids is never what I would describe as "fun", but certainly some trips are easier than others. Today's trip would fall into the "other" category. My own three children and a friend of the 9 year old.....Steph and myself.....and a dog. You would think it would be a smooth trip considering we are equipped with 4 Nintendo DSs, a DVD in the player, 4 iPods and 6 imaginative brains. Not so. Still the classic "are we there yet" gets repeated again and again as we drive the same route that we have traveled since the children have been born. Some time ago Steph started breaking the trip up into TV show episodes....For example the entire trip takes two Phineas and Ferbs and one Backyardigans. Today she tried a new approach...she pointed out landmarks along the way and gave them an idea of how much longer we had until we reached our destination. We won't know until next time if that worked, but it killed some time anyway. And, what was I doing to distract myself from the carsickness that often overtakes me on long journeys? I was typing this blog...well, on the end of the trip home anyway. Do you wonder how I manage to type online while a passenger in a car doing 70 mph down Route 283? Well, it is a combination of things. Obviously it starts with my laptop. Then to acquire an internet connection I have a nifty system called "tethering". To make it simple to understand I attach my Blackberry to a USB cable and plug it into my computer. Then I open the tethering program on both devices and VIOLA...the Internet! And lastly, to keep my poor overused laptop charged I purchased a handy dandy device at Wal-Mart that keeps ALL my techieware fully charged and ready to use. It is really a MUST-HAVE for everyone...even if you aren't technology obsessed. I promise to make my next post much more entertaining, but for now I am off to transfer all my stuff onto the new 500 GB hard drive I just installed on my laptop!! WOOT!!