after a long and exhausting day my family and i are now back home in baton rouge. at 11:30 this morning we started our trip back home from a wonderful weekend at gulf shores, alabama. we figured the traffic would be a little heavy so we had planned on allowing an hour and a half, or at most two hours, to make the trip to mobile, which normally takes 45 minutes. turns out we were way off. apparently all the drunks and just generally bad driver in the southeast decided to get together over labor day around gulf shores and hold a “how not to drive” convention. it would appear that part of this convention was a demonstration on highway 59. the bad driving demonstration clogged up 59 all the way from gulf shores to the interstate (about 30 to 40 miles). it would appear that the bad drivers were having such a good time chocking up the roadway that they quickly voted and unanimously decided the take their convention into mobile via interstate 10. this of course messed up i-10. the trip from gulf shores to mobile lasted until 3:00 p.m. (almost 4 hours!). that made for a world of fun, in fact too much fun for us, so we decided to stop and finally eat lunch and visited with my parents. this took about an hour. we figured by then all the crazies would have left the road. we had three hours worth of driving ahead of us between mobile and baton rouge. we were looking forward to a pleasant journey for the rest of the time. of course, i hadn’t thought of the fact that the people leaving the bad drivers convention would be going in all directions and spreading havoc as they went. our three hour drive extended itself to 5 hours. all in all this made our 4 hour trip into a nearly 9 hour trip. we averaged about 33 miles per hour. pretty excellent speed for a horse, but not for a 626.
here’s the point of all this. my kids decided to start asking questions. what place would you most like to go it? not a restaurant, but what geographic place (i.e. state or country). what car would you most like to drive? etc. my 9 and 6 year old made the journey enjoyable. without them I probably would have just fumed over the long trip. instead, i laughed a lot with my family. life is a journey… try to enjoy the journey. i’m trying real hard.