I’m back from our Grand Tour of the South. First things first: I managed to kill my laptop while I was travelling. So I am wearing black in mourning from destroying yet another computer. I’m beginning to thing I am made of magnets. How else to explain the destruction I bring upon all computers I touch? Mister tried all his tricks and my laptop (which I just got six months ago) is DEAD. I’m just praying that I didn’t kill the hard drive of my computer because you know I didn’t back up anything.  Who backs up stuff on a new computer that is working perfectly? Anyway, I’m back to using the kids’ computer. What a drag.

It’s going to take me a while to give you the details of our trip, but in a nutshell it was excellent. We spent two weeks travelling around in Betsy–my trusty Honda Odyssey who behaved perfectly–and seeing most of the South. We covered over 4000 miles. Because I like to kind of plan as I go and because I didn’t have access to a real computer most of the time, we didn’t see as much as I would have liked to. Planning a trip on an iphone is not the easiest thing to do. I’m sure some of you are pooh-poohing and thinking how if I’d planned everything meticulously before I went then I wouldn’t have been up a creek. But I do hate how planning excessively makes me feel very trapped and incredibly frustrated when the plans change. When there are six kids involved, plans most certainly do change.

But we hit all the high points. And saw lots of stuff.

We ended up travelling through Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. I wish we could have spent several days in each place but, alas, our budget conspired against us. Plus we had to work around various kid activities so our scheduled departure and arrival times were completely inflexible.

As we drove across the Mississippi River (the first time) I realized that except for a couple of trips to DisneyWorld my kids had never been to the Eastern U.S. We have become Westerners. I was happy that I finally had the opportunity to show them this wonderful (and might I say it, best) part of America. (OK, slight correction: we took India to North Carolina when she was a baby to visit my Grandmother.)

Here are the most important things that I realized driving around on the trip:

1. I totally love to drive. Seriously love it. Except for a couple of hours when I turned the wheel over to India, I did all the driving. I love to look out the window, listen to music, eat junk food and hang out with my kids. This is the perfect marriage of all four things. I like the quickness of airplanes, but my heart belongs in a car. (That’s what happens when you’re born in Detroit, I guess.)

2. I really, really miss hills and trees. I’ve spent many years living in places that either don’t have a ton of greenery or are very flat (Utah has obnoxious mountains but most of it is flat as can be. I’m more of a rolling hill kind of person). I had forgotten how beautiful greenery can be. I was constantly trying to take pictures from my moving car because I simply could not get over how gorgeous the scenery was. Especially in North Carolina and Virginia. I won’t lie, I was looking at Zillow a lot.

3. Books on CD are worth their weight in gold. We got through four Harry Potter books on our drive. We might have killed each other if not for JK Rowling and Jim Dale.

4, Being a single parent is a drag. With six kids I can’t exactly say I was lonely, but I missed having someone to discuss everything with. Also, someone to take the reins when I was done. Instead I lost my temper a few times. But there are pros to be a single parent too; namely one less opinion to consider. We were all pretty thrilled to see Mister when we got back to Texas.

I’ll have more details to give you later, but I wanted to check in and say hi first. Hi!

P.S. Mister just came in and told me that the hard drive on my computer is fried. Crap! crap, crap, crap.