I’m worn out from pushing a stroller all day.  I spent the afternoon wrangling kids in a gift shop, and I paid way too much for a mediocre lunch.  It can only mean one thing: the McKibben’s are on vacation!

 I have now learned from experience that every vacation we take in the future we will be departing on a Saturday.  My original plan was to leave on Tuesday, but as soon as Ken got off work on Friday, he put his vacation shorts on, dug his flip flops out of the closet, and said, “Let’s go!”  I spent the next day and a half slinging clothes into laundry baskets and shuttling stuff between our house and the motor home.  I didn’t stop for 18 hours straight, but I turned three days of packing into one.  We finally pulled out of the driveway on Sunday afternoon, and it was a good thing because after all that packing, I really needed a vacation.

 Our first destination was to Natural Bridge, Virginia, or to be more precise, Jellystone Park in Natural Bridge, Virginia.  The internet made it look like a kid’s paradise and the best campground in the world, but from what I can tell, it’s basically a normal campground with a slash pad, inflatable bouncing pad, and Yogi Bear’s picture plastered on anything that will stand still.

 However, as far as Edie’s concerned, it is, in fact, the best campground in the world.  She is especially a fan of the times Yogi Bear himself has come by our campsite for a hug.  Two days ago, she’d never even heard of him, but I guess she thinks he must be pretty famous since she’s been seeing his picture everywhere lately.

 There is a fair amount to do in this little area provided you have good weather.  I can say for a fact that there is absolutely NOTHING to do here if you don’t.  In hindsight, I might not have busted my butt to get us out of the house early if I had known that we would just be spending the extra day cooped up in the RV due to rain.

 It started raining first thing in the morning while we were saying the pledge of allegiance with Yogi Bear.  We immediately began searching the internet for something to do indoors since all of our planned activities needed sunshine and quickly realized that we were grasping at straws.  Our first day of vacation consisted of lunch at Burger King, and a stop by Radio Shack and the Dollar Store. 

 By evening the rain had not let up.  So onto the next plan:  the movies.  However, even that seemed somewhat impossible.  According to Fandango, the nearest movie theater was over an hour away.  I kept searching and coming up with nothing.  I could feel the RV walls moving in on me.  Edie was whiney.  Roark was getting into everything, and I was quickly losing it.  I told Ken, “I don’t care what we do, but we’ve got to get out of this RV!”

 So Ken set down in front of the computer and began to work his magic.  Five minutes later, he was telling everyone to get their shoes on.  He had found a little theater showing the Beesus and Ramona movie about fifteen minutes away, and it was starting in ten minutes. 

 I can’t imagine a more perfect movie theater for our purpose.  First, when I was buying our tickets, the young girl behind the counter told me that Tuesday was “Family Night,” so right there I could feel our luck changing.  Second, we were the only people there, and I mean, in the ENTIRE theater.  As in, we were the only people that patronized the establishment that whole evening.  This was great because Roark could run the aisles once he was bored with the movie and no one would care.  They actually waited until we took our seats to begin the show.

 Now to really appreciate this scene, you have to remember what we do for a living.  Ken has worked in some of the finest movie theaters in the country, and we are proud to boast that some of them are even our clients.  So when a third of the movie was being projected onto the curtains and there wasn’t even a sub in the speakers, we just looked at each other and laughed.  We drove nine hours to watch Ramona Quimby in a two bit theater.  The scene was priceless. 

 It was really a cute movie.  I had secretly wanted to see it since Beverly Cleary was one of my favorite children’s authors.  So it worked out because I didn’t really see Ken allowing me to add it to our Netflix queue.  There were even several funny parts where we all laughed out loud.  But the best moment was when the train went by outside and was so loud I thought the stained ceiling tiles were going to fall down on our heads. 

 We all had popcorn for dinner and bladder-busting-sized cokes, and during the credits, the kids and I danced in the aisles just because we could.   Once again, Daddy saved the day, and whenever I think of that movie, I will always remember that night in Virginia where we got to enjoy our own private showing.

I’m not fooling myself.  There are a handful of people that periodically come to this blog, maybe even read some of the entries from time to time, but I know what you are really looking to find.  You put up with my ramblings about my kiddos, maybe even enjoy the pictures a little bit, but what you’re really hoping to see is that Ken has posted a new video.

The truth doesn’t hurt my feelings.  I love the videos too, and I have enjoyed watching him over the past several months as he has been editing away on our vacation footage.  If you have been a guest in our house during this time, I’ve probably even forced you to watch them.  And if you haven’t, well, now it’s your turn.

For those of you who are new to the blog, or like my sweet husband, just can’t remember what you ate for breakfast, here’s a little reminder:

Last summer we borrowed my parents’ motor-home, loaded up the kids, and spent two weeks on a road trip across this beautiful country.  We started in our great state of Alabama and headed north through Tennessee until we hit our first stop:  Elizabethtown, KY, to see the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln.

From Abe’s house, we moved on through Kentucky, and finally pulled into the lovely town of Floyds Knobs, Indiana where we visited with some old friends for the night.  For my travel log and more info on our first stop, click here.

As for the vacation videos, to watch the video in it’s entirety is somewhat of a time commitment, so we have decide to post segments of the video every Monday over the next several weeks.  Here is the first installment.  Enjoy!

So a couple of weeks ago, Ken comes into my office hatching a plan to take the kids in the RV to Mississippi while he finishes up some work on a church in the area.  It sounded like a pretty good idea at the time, but we were under the impression that he would only be working 3 to 4 hours a day.  Then the rest of the time would be spent hiking and fishing with the kids.  Well…we were wrong.

Ken ended up working more like 12 hours a day which was unavoidable and not his fault.  On a side note, that’s one of the benefits of working with your spouse, especially for him.  When work calls, I don’t get bitter.  In fact, I’m normally shoving him out the door to go finish the job or make the sale because that means we can collect on a check from the client and then I’ll be able to make payroll for the month. Pretty important when employees’ kids want to eat and all.

So his long hours on the job site meant long hours for me on a camp site.  The kids were really well-behaved, and I think they had a pretty good time.  Edie literally rode the pedals off her new bike, and Roarkie followed alongside in his little push car. 

As we were packing the motor home to leave, Roark’s push car almost didn’t make it because it was so big and bulky, but thank goodness Ken managed to find room.  Can we say, “LIFESAVER”?  I don’t know what we would have done without Roarkie’s riding toy.  We were already doing without Daddy and hot water…Oh wait, I forgot to mention that part, didn’t I?

It all started the first night as we were setting up camp.  Ken and I have a routine for setting up.  He handles all the stuff on the outside, and I unpack all our things on the inside.  As we pulled in, we both quickly went to our set-up stations.  It was pretty late at this point, and the kids were way past their bed time. 

As I unpacked our things inside the motor-home, and I began to hear water pouring out of somewhere.  I quickly checked all the places.  Since I was in an RV, this took about two seconds of moving my eyes around to realize that the water was not coming out of a faucet anywhere.  I then looked down on the floor just in time to see thick, black water slowly making it’s way across the carpet.

I quickly stuck my head out the door and yelled for Ken, “Whatever you did with the water, TURN IT OFF!!!  TURN IT OFF NOW!!!”  It turns out that since this was an unusually cold winter for Alabama, my dad’s normal winterizing of the RV didn’t cut it, and some of the pipes had frozen…including the water filter under the sink which explained the thick, black oozing water on the floor.

So Ken was able to fix things enough that we did have water, but due to some other issues, we didn’t have hot water, which basically boiled down to bath house showers for everyone. 

Edie thought showering in the bath house was a blast and one of the highlights of the trip.  Ken saw it more as an inconvenience, and me?  Well, I felt I was personally being tested by God to see how much patience and love I would pour out on my children in stressful conditions.  I’m not sure I passed.  I yelled at Edie for playing in the grungy shower curtain and threatened to spank her bottom if she touched anything else in that filthy place.  And I might have said a couple of cuss words when I almost dropped a soaped-up Roark since I had to hold him the entire time because he didn’t have a pair of shower shoes.  Ah…memories.

Oh, the entire trip wasn’t horrible.  There were just bits of horrible mixed in with the fun…like at the park, for example.  We were playing chase and hide & go seek, and in all honesty, having a good time.   Edie and I had collected pine cones and sticks to make a pretend soup as Roarkie did a little exploring of his own.  He’d walked a good distance, but still completely within my view.  It was a grassy field.  There really wasn’t anywhere for him to go.

But then I noticed him fussing a bit.  Not crying really, just kind of irritated with something.  I got up to get him, and as I got closer, I began to run.  He was standing in ant bed and covered in about a cazillion ants.  I immediately began ripping clothing off of him until he was down to his diaper.  I was almost in tears, asking myself how I could be so stupid to let him wander away like that.  That’s Motherhood 101.  Plus he’d never had an ant bite before, let alone thirty, so I had no idea how he was going to react.  Now I know, he only gets mildly irritated by them, but at the time, it was really scary.

The highlight of the trip was definitely the four or five hours Ken was able to join us for a camp fire.  Edie had asked me at least twenty times each day when we were going to build a fire, but with the way the weekend had been going, I saw that ending with a trip to the emergency room.  So I kept putting her off and told her “fire is more of a Daddy thing.” 

So the one day Ken was able to come back before dark, we took full advantage of it.  We gathered sticks and firewood, took a walk near the lake, and then cooked supper on the fire.  We spent the rest of the evening sitting around the campfire and talking about the trip.  We made sure to mention all the high points and low points as we laughed and ate s’mores. 

Looking back, I kind of felt like I was in a National Lampoon’s movie minus Christie Brinkley and a Ferrari.  And similar to Chevy Chase, I like to think I pulled it all together in the end, and that we even went out on a high note.

Campgrounds are an ideal place to do some great people watching.   I mean really, where else can you find Prevost owning millionaires squished in next to a family of eight living out of their van?  That was the observation that we made this past weekend while “roughing it” at Noccalula Falls.

We sat comfortably in our air-conditioned motor home as we watched the melting pot of people pass by.  We laughed at our weekend neighbors making out at the picnic table next door.  And we made a new friend and learned a new life story every time we walked outside.

Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion in our house of becoming campers ourselves.  So we thought we would take my parents’ RV on a test run.  We’ve been seriously considering a big trip in the RV to Niagara Falls later in the summer.   As it turns out, Ken can drive the thing, and everyone made it home alive.  So we’ve passed the first test.

Here are a couple of pics Ken took from the weekend: