I arrived at our hotel room close to midnight. Everyone else was asleep, or at least trying to asleep. Ian was frustrated because they had promised him a no smoking room and by the way it smelled, that was definitely not the case. However, we were only staying there for a few hours before we woke up early for the drive so it wasn't that big of a deal.
I got ready for bed and hopped in. My mind was spinning, so I had some trouble going to sleep. Then, after a few hours of fitful tossing and turning I woke up to the dog sitting up from his usual position at our feet absolutely shaking. Poor dog! I assumed that he was freezing cold, and indeed, the room was very chilly so I went over to the air conditioner and cranked it warmer. I headed back to bed and while I was rubbing the dog trying to get the shaking to stop I started smelling smoke. Apparently, turning up the temperature so much had cranked on the heat and it smelled like something was about to catch fire. So, I ran back over and just turned it off...awesome!
Then as all this was going on, Ian and I noticed that the smoke alarm was doing it's fabulously annoying "low battery" beep. Great! So, I spent the rest of the night laying there worrying about the dog and that the room would catch fire and it wouldn't be caught because the smoke detector was broken. That definitely made for one of the worst night's sleep that I've ever had. (Oh, and it turns out the dog wasn't cold. Weeks later when I was having my home alarm installed, Rip started doing the same shaking. Turns out he didn't like the beeps of the alarm, like the beeps of the smoke alarm. Who knew?!)
Fortunately, I didn't have to be in that room for long. Our alarms were set for 5am, and we packed up, picked up some tired sleeping kiddos, and dumped everyone and everything in the car for our journey. We were off. The 14 hour drive to St. Louis was about as uneventful as a 14 hour drive can be. We travelled through North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and finally, into Missouri! The kids patiently played video games, read books, and watched movies the whole time. They've really gotten to be pretty good travelers. Ripple was sleeping for the most part, but whenever we stopped and one of the adults took the kids to the restroom, Ripple got very concerned. He was so stressed about the pack getting separated. Poor dog!
While we were journeying Ian entertained us by writing fabulous little Oregon Trail updates and posting them to Facebook. We both had always loved playing that game in elementary school, so we thought it was appropriate as we were on our journey. We went "hunting" for McNuggets, forded the mighty Mississippi, and poor Ripple even "got cholera". Hey, it kept us busy.
After a long day in the car, we finally passed by the St. Louis arch and arrived safely at the Homewood Suites-Chesterfield which would be our home for the next few days. We had arrived...now what was going to happen?
(heading out from the hotel on the morning of our drive-If you look carefully you can see our moving truck with all of our possessions conveniently parked in the Waffle House across the street.)
(Moving can be tiring!)
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