Riding in Cars with Babies

Let's just start at the very beginning, shall we? Our trip to Shenandoah National Park commenced on Friday in the early afternoon. David, my husband, took a half day, and I picked him up from the train to get a speedy start.

Well, speedy is not the word to use for our ride to Virginia on the Friday prior to Memorial Day. We crawled our way around Baltimore to I-81 South with a screaming baby, stopping three times for him to nurse and once to eat dinner over our ten-hour (from the time Goober was strapped in to pick up his Daddy from work) excursion.

Gabe looking fresh and happy after one of his three breaks on our ride down to VA.

Honestly, things went all right, but Gabe needed serious entertainment the entire time. As in, read me a book, talk to me, play peek-a-boo, show me how to clap and make me clap, play with me, give me different toys every 5 minutes, hum and bob your head to my favorite Baby Einstein CD, no-I-will-not-take-a-nap, entertainment.

Luckily, as he started to fuss from the ear-popping changes as we hit the rise in elevation up to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Skyline Drive, I grabbed a bottle for him to suck. And it quieted him down and soothed him so that my poor husband could focus on the somewhere around two feet of visibility in front of our car at 9 p.m. Ironically, my parents pulled out of the Skyland Resort's parking lot (where they, all of my sisters and parents ate dinner because they all got there way ahead of us) as we scuttled along the Drive to the Big Meadows Lodge (where we all stayed), and my Dad was particularly impressed with Dave's driving in fog/cloud skills. My husband is unusually talented at no street lamp mountain fog driving. I'd say that's a great skill to have.

A view of the Blue Ridge Mountains from the Skyline Drive

The drive home was much, much better. I credit that to Gabe's behavior always being better earlier in the day, the fact that Gabe took two naps on the way home, and that the traffic was drastically reduced. We also were able to enjoy the complete drive and views along Shenandoah's Sklyline Drive on the way home, which we could not remotely see on the way to the lodge.

I will say that Gabe, was not always the most behaved on the way home... when he wants to be held, he does not take "We'll get to the next exit for you to nurse, honey," very well. You can see that whole picture below.


Anyway, it took us just over six and one half hours to get home, stopping just once per Gabe's feeding cues-- much better than the original ten!

My husband, Gabe, and I have all been pretty tired since we got home. Gabe went down to bed by 9 p.m. last night *gasp* and only got up once to nurse around 11:30, and then slept on until 7 a.m. I went to bed at 9:30 p.m., which is usually impossible and extremely unlike me to do. I still felt exhausted 7 a.m., and I am very tired now. My husband is in the middle of a summer semester of grad school, so add in all his driving over the past week with work stress, grad papers, and being a Dad/husband, and you can imagine how tired he is right now. So we're all headed to bed! We've got another roadtrip coming up in August when we go on vacation to Vermont so we'll see how that ride goes.

As for Shenandoah, I'll be posting so much more on the specifics of our trip. It was a beautiful weekend. **Spoiler Alert** My husband and I even got to do a 3.3 mile hike by ourselves!