one-year adoption trip.

We decided to celebrate our first year of adoption with a family experience. David and I are terrible about keeping surprises from the kids, but we managed to keep our overnight trip a secret until Wednesday morning. We sat at the dining table doing school work, and David came in from CrossFit and announced that we were dropping everything and heading on an adventure!

Going on a “benture” is Noah’s favorite thing in the entire world, and something he requests daily (along with pumpkins, the Great Wolf Lodge, and the beach). Everyone was thrilled! So we booked a hotel room on Priceline, packed a suitcase, and hit the road.

We had a lovely lunch by a pond at Table Rock. We have this picnic lunch thing down to a science, and now pack it on all of our road trips in order to save money and avoid eating that one extra meal out: tuna salad with crackers, hummus and carrot sticks, apples, and a dark chocolate bar.

Nearly all of our adventures are sprinkled with a certain amount of misadventure (just ask anyone who’s gone along for the ride with us). But we’ve learned a lot about being flexible and having fun no matter what!

Somehow we took a VERY circuitous route to the end of the Art Loeb Trail outside of Brevard, NC, which David recently hiked with a couple of friends. He wanted to take the kids to do a little hiking and play in the Davidson River. What should have been a 2 1/2 hour road trip took about 4 1/2 hours in all, and everyone was a little stir crazy by the end! We also never found the exact spot David had in his head, but the kids seized the day and had a blast splashing in the river anyway. We planned to stay for several hours, but after about 30 minutes, they were freezing cold and ready to get dry and warm, so we changed clothes, loaded up, and went searching for another activity!

We drove into Brevard and found a playground downtown (Franklin Park) that the kids loved. We played there for an hour until dinner.

David and I have been trying to eat at Rocky’s Soda Shop in Brevard for three years, ever since we discovered it back in our MTW days. Somehow it’s always closed when we show up for dinner, so this time we called ahead, and made it before it closed at 6:00 (I think they have later hours in the summer). The food is good, but it’s the whole old-fashioned diner atmosphere that we wanted the kids to experience, complete with chocolate milkshakes for the first course.

We drove 40 more minutes to Flat Rock to spend the night, because we wanted to end up there the next morning. Our best find of the trip was a hotel with an indoor pool!

We brought sleeping bags so the three oldest kids could camp out on the floor; I shared a full-sized bed with Noah, and David took the other bed (David jokes that my definition of camping is all of us sharing one hotel room). We got everyone tucked in at around 8:30, and David and I dragged the two chairs into the little kitchenette to huddle with our books and plastic cups of wine by lamplight, and Judah read Harry Potter in his sleeping bag. It was cozy!

We ate the complimentary hotel breakfast the next morning, and let the kids take another swim before packing up and checking out. We stopped by the Flat Rock Village Bakery for coffee to-go, then drove around the corner to the Carl Sandburg Home for the morning. You guys, this place is amazing! Friends have been telling us to go for years, and we just hadn’t made it yet.

The grounds are completely free; you only pay a small fee to tour the home, which we opted out of this time. So we walked the trails in the woods, saw the ducks in the pond, then wandered up the hill past the house to the goat barn. We met the four baby goats, then the kids got to run free in the field with the adult goats (or “ghosts,” as Noah called them). It was surprisingly cold and windy yesterday, but other than that, idyllic.

I honestly didn’t want to leave, and if we stay in Flat Rock again, we’ll definitely be returning. There are more hiking trails we didn’t get to try out, and the whole place is tremendously beautiful and peaceful.

We finished our adventure with pizza at the Flat Rock Wood Room (which has fantastic barbecue too), and then hit the road to come back home! We contemplated an afternoon hike, but Noah was lagging, and we decided to end on a high note. Maybe next time!

The full honest truth is that traveling with young children is not for the faint of heart, especially traveling with four young children. We’d gotten to a much more flexible, easy stage with our two big kids a year ago, and traveling these days requires much more stamina (and more packing; somehow packing for one overnight feels the same as packing for a week — and I still always forget something)!

But even though it’s more exhausting, David and I also decided it’s way more fun too. Doubling the kids doubles the excitement and energy for anything we do. The pool was full of shrieks and splashing and singing, and we just love watching our four kids enjoying one another’s company. There’s always a sibling to keep you company, and we love how the addition of Gabe and Noah makes our whole family experience the world around us differently.

We also couldn’t be happier that these boys love to travel as much as the rest of us do!