Birthday trip, Thursday travel

Let's go back to last Wednesday. I'm sitting at home, and Dan is working late. The girls are driving me crazy... they are so bored.

The phone rings. It's my wonderful, kind and generous father. He tells me my equally wonderful, kind and generous mother is taking my son on a field trip that afternoon that will take them close to our usual drop-off point. Would I mind just bringing the girls up today to meet them?

Yeah, that works for me. The girls pack. I pack for the dog (gotta have his puppa food), and we're off. Drop them off, stop on the way home and pick up some Arby's. Don't tell Dan, but I got some of those loaded potato bite thingy-s to eat on the way home. Just bought roast beef sandwiches for us to reheat that evening, but had my potatoes for the trip home. Stopped and filled up the van, decided to get the deluxe car wash, and ate my snack while sitting in the car wash, listening to Don and Mike. Been a long time since I've listened to them.

Came home, had dinner, watched Ghost Hunters and Top Chef, Dan went to bed. I was too wound up to sleep, so I stayed up and watched some more Ghost Hunters. Which freaked me out.

Then I couldn't get to sleep.

Thought I'd sleep late the next morning... no kids, no dog.... but I was up with Dan at 6 am. Can't remember what I did that morning, besides skirmish with Dan about the size of our toiletry bag for the trip. OK, so I actually packed a small suitcase full of toiletries. This trip was about me, and I wanted to look good. (I took 152 photos, and only 3 of them have me in them. Dan is in none of them. But there is some nice video of my cleavage. I can hook you up....)

Dan eats lunch really early when he's working, so I tried to eat my lunch early too. Ended up with a small salad about 11 am. I had 2 CSI:NY dvds from Netflix, so I spent a lot of my day watching them. Had just finished them up and had switched over to watching stuff on the DVR when the phone rings.

It's work.

Yup, that time of year... back to school. Seems my address was wrong on a letter and it got returned. Except it wasn't wrong. The secretary just decided to voluntarily omit part of my address. Which would be why it was returned marked "insufficient address."

Just getting seeing the district office phone number on the caller ID really freaked me out. I was seriously shaken by it. Nothing like having the fact that you have to go back to work in 2 weeks just thrown in your face.

So I'm still sitting there a bit shaky when the phone rings again. It's about 1:30 now, and it's Dan. He's supposed to get off at 3 pm, but he tells me that the guy coming in to relieve him called in sick, and now he's not sure....

Folks, I'm tired. And I'm shaken already. I just couldn't even process what he's telling me.

Then he says, "Psych. I'm about 2 minutes from home."

Which was not even funny.

He gets home, showers, and I take the wheel. We listen to the CD I made (and thanks for all the great comments about that mix! I loved reading them!). Stop after about 2 hours, use the restroom, grab some iced tea, and 2 ice cream sandwiches and we're off again.

It was after our restroom stop that we discussed how odd it was to travel without the children. No standing in the truck stop debating what to get for a snack for 10 minutes. No one asking to stop and use the restroom 10 minutes after our last break. No one wanting to watch a movie, or listen to different music, or arguing over DS.

We get almost to the Missouri state line and hit a detour. I had looked up road construction before we left and knew the road was closed down there, but the website said it should be finished by Friday. So it's Thursday night, but it's still closed. The detour says to go West, but I'm trying to get East.

We have no map. But we go East. I know where East will eventually lead, and from there I can get us back to our normal route, so we decide to be brave and try it. If you knew me, you'd know how totally out of character this is for me. I don't go off on a road without knowing absolutely exactly where it goes. I'm not a "scenic route" person, am I, mom? I stick to main routes and will go out of my way to take a 4 lane road over a 2 lane. So this development was pretty shocking.

Along about here, my phone rings. It's my school. Earlier it was just the district, now it's my school. But it was cool and I actually got a little excited about going back to work after that call.

Pretty uneventful drive the rest of the way. We're pretty hungry as we're pulling into Branson about 7 pm. And there's Chili's.

Which is how I ended up with a margarita in my hand within 10 minutes of pulling into Branson. Dan had a spiked strawberry lemonade. I went with the classic margarita. We ate appetizers, and laughed our fool heads off. Everything's more amusing when there's no kids around.

Finished eating and went to our motel for the night. When we decided to drive down on Thursday, we needed a cheap hotel for our first night.

OK, if you ask me, we didn't need a cheap hotel. If it had been up to me, we would have reserved a night at the Fairfield, where we were staying Fri/Sat, but Dan wanted to spend as little as possible. Whispering Hills Inn gets great reviews on my favorite Branson message board, 1Branson.  We made reservations there for $50/night. And it was a decent hotel for the price. 2 beds, cookies and ice cream in the evening, an OK breakfast the next morning (I am not a fan of hotel breakfasts). We watched some silly thing about the Hamptons on VH1 and then Ace of Cakes before going to bed. For the record, I had really tried to talk Dan into seeing a show on Thursday night when it became clear we'd arrive by 7 pm, but he had this crazy idea that we should eat dinner.

I was trying to remember why we didn't go do something yet that night. Now I remember... they put us on the 3rd floor. Which wouldn't be bad, except I'm scared to death of heights and my greatest fear is those steps with the open area between them. Which is what they had at Whispering Hills. We got up to our room and I wasn't about to leave because I didn't think I could get back up. Luckily the snack/breakfast room was on the 3rd floor.

Of course, the next morning I realized that if I walked on past the Hospitality Room, we were practically at ground level and I could go back and forth without fear. But at the time, I was scared and pretty much hid in the room.

After breakfast the next morning, we went down to the motel office. I remembered that they sold ticket vouchers at discounted prices (with no timeshare tours), and I wanted to see the list because we still had room for at least 1 show, maybe 2.

Dan and I took the list, and sat down at a table to discuss. Dan suggested we buy vouchers and go see Six. Which is pretty funny because last week on Tuesday, I had been looking at their website and suggested to Dan that we go see Six and he said no. But now he thinks it's a great idea. I'm not going to complain.

We get our vouchers, go up and shower and get dressed. This takes me a bit because I'm not completely sure I'm going to have access to a mirror before our 3 pm show, and so I do the full bit -- hair, makeup. And we're off...