day 17 and 18: driving home.

Thank you all for putting up with my blog editing errors as I wrote posts from hotel poolsides and the van when I could get a Wi-fi hotspot, and at times in a fog of sleep-deprivation. Proper English major that I am, I’m mortified as I reread and fix posts. But you’ve been more than gracious.

So, let’s wrap all this up, shall we?

We allowed ourselves four days to drive home, with plans to stop at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona on Day 17. David had someone scheduled to preach for him on Sunday, and, “We’ll just take our time and explore and process the trip,” we told each other.

Well the moment we stepped off that train from the Grand Canyon, all six of us knew we were done. With everything about this trip. We did not want to see one more national park. We did not want to poke around another hipster town. We certainly didn’t want to sleep, crammed together, in any more humid hotel rooms than were absolutely necessary. And don’t even get me started on public restrooms.

So we drove 29 hours in two days, and got home at 1 am Saturday morning.

Even now, a week later, it’s something of a blur.

That drive is not for the faint of heart.

But David and I agreed that in some strange way, those two days hold some of the fondest memories of our trip. These are also moments I don’t want to forget.

David asked us all, “So do you really want to be home Friday night?” To which we replied enthusiastically, “Yes!” And he then said, “Okay, but you have to listen to me.” So we did, but I’ll admit that it was grudgingly at times because he turned into something of a drill sergeant.

Timed rest area stops, speedy fast food dinners, potty breaks at the side of the road if we were running behind on time. He even limited our breakfast options that last travel day: “Okay you can have a bagel but you can’t toast it. Takes too long.”

We groaned, we hated climbing back into the van, but he knew what we needed to do to get home.

All of this was made hilariously funny by the fact that we chose Cheaper by the Dozen as our last audiobook, which is a story about a father whose goal with his family of 14 is efficiency in all areas of life. So we laughed even harder as we listened, then dashed out of the van for a 5-minute coffee-and-vanilla-steamer stop (thank you, Jessica and Allison, for giving the kids and their parents Starbucks gift cards to last all the way home).

Cheaper By the Dozen is the perfect road trip audiobook (make sure your version is narrated by Dana Ivey), and we’re still quoting it today, but heads up that it’s definitely rated PG. I think it’s perfect for older elementary school on up to adult, and I’m positive it will be re-listened to many times in the future of Gentino road trips.

After a trial-and-error at the beginning of this trip, we settled on Holiday Inn Express as our favorite travel hotel because it offers free breakfast, and for grown-ups, healthy breakfast options (like clockwork, I choose two hard-boiled eggs, a Chobani yogurt, fruit, and turkey sausage). On those driving days, that would be our biggest meal of the day. It never let us down, our rooms were clean and service was always friendly, but even so, I do not want to see the inside of a Holiday Inn Express for a very long time.

The kids were incredible. They doodled on activity books my mom had given us, listened to books or music with us, played with toys, read entire books (Judah), put stickers all over their faces and folded coloring pages into paper airplanes. Our favorite was when they put the stickers right over their mouths.

We worked on our license plate list. We sang very loudly to pop songs from the 90’s and 2000’s, listened to praise and worship, and turned everything off sometimes too, just for silence. Judah stayed up with us until 2:00 am Wednesday night as we listened to our book together and thought, If we can just make it to Little Rock.

Yes, we had desperate moments, where we all thought, I cannot get back in that van again.

But we also got to see the orange, low-slung moon moving above the horizon in the inky night sky, and actually watch it rise and shrink and turn a glowing, creamy white as we drove and drove. Gabe said, “I didn’t know the moon could look that color.”

We saw deer lurk in the shadows of 40-East both nights, and squinted our eyes harder to keep watch, and prayed for safety.

We used rest areas with signs warning us of rattlesnakes in the bushes and kept a tight hand on Noah.

We passed from the scrubby, deserted West through a sliver of Texas and back into the East. The landscape became gentle. The air and sun became gentle, muted, it seemed.

The green was a feast for our tired eyes.

We noticed that there’s so many people in the Southeast. We saw more racial diversity. After hours of straining for a decent gas station, it seemed that every exit held wonders galore: Starbucks and Shell and Wal-Mart. But we couldn’t stop!! We pressed onward and onward and caffeinated ourselves when we felt desperate.

I became enamored by clouds, the gauzy white draped across a blue morning sky, or the puffy white formations in the afternoon. Clouds are so nice. Rain is so nice.

After all that beauty we discovered, home feels wonderful. Isn’t it funny the way your eye strains for what is familiar — even, sometimes, over what’s exotic and lovely?

We learned how it felt to miss our part of the country, to rejoice as we crossed into the Atlantic time zone. We lost three hours on the drive east, but kept our clocks and watches turned back, so that we would remember to keep driving.

We saved the best for last, and listened to Jim Gaffigan those last two dark hours on 1-20 East from Atlanta, and laughed until our sides hurt.

And then, just like that, we were pulling into our driveway at 1:00 am, and wandering, bleary-eyed, bewildered, and happy, through the rooms of our own house.

Our friends, Joyce and Amber, had left balloons and breakfast supplies and a lasagna and a bottle of wine. Our friend Hannah had left lentil soup and a loaf of sourdough bread in the freezer. David’s parents had fed our chickens and kept our garden beds alive, painted both our master bedroom baseboards and David’s workshop, and hung our cabinet doors from the addition project a year and a half ago.

We were amazed.

It was wonderful to go away, and it is good to be home.