Riding in cars, with kids, with toys

Day 1: travel

Finally back from a wonderful visit with my beautiful daughters. The day after Christmas I picked them up early, the weather was nice. I had asked my ex to pack as much entertaining distractions as possible for the long, long eight to nine hour ride to Charleston, SC, and she glady obliged. Darling daughter number two fell asleep not long after the journey began. As it was still fairly early in the morning and they, like kids everywhere, stay up late...especially when school is out. Darling daughter number one though is more of a morning person so she settled in with her fully charged PSP and commenced racing, wrecking, punching, kicking, stealing, shooting, and all manner of video gaming actions. Those PSP's have some sweet graphics. So the trip was off to a wonderful start.

Darling daughter two awoke in a couple of hours and busted out her Video Now Player (Hasbro) to watch some cartoons, but soon discovered that the Player wasn't working. She put the disc she wanted to watch in and hit play, but the screen would only light up for a second and then go dark. Sound continued to work though, but as one could imagine cartoons pretty much require video to go with audio for it to entertain. I wonder if kids back in the day really "got" comedic radio broadcasts...before even my time. Anyway, I asked her to let me have a look at the Player, but after fiddling with the brightness/contrast slider, there wasn't much left to try. It was officially broken.

Since I was in no great hurry to make it to Charleston that day, and being the day after Christmas it was quite busy on the highway, I decided for an alteration in plan. I would drive until the darling daughters just got too bored and restless, then stop for the night, and get them up early the next morning so they could opt to sleep the 2 or 3 hours remaining of the drive. We stopped around 5PM in a fairly large town just outside of Charlotte...Mooreville I think it was...I only wanted it to have a movie theatre and a Wal-Mart, which it did.

The darling daughters wanted to hit the Wal-Mart to spend some of the Christmas cash that was aching to be spent, and I certainly wasn't going to get in the way. So we bought some more toys and play things on top of what they had gotten for Christmas, went back to the hotel to stow the bounty, and were off again to catch the "new" live action Charlottes Web (which wasn't bad). Just like the old animated version I grew up with only with real (or at least computer generated in Charlotte's case) animals and people. A wonderful drive and evening behind us...sleep.

Hindsight...never did get the Video Now Player to work, so upon our return I looked up the problem on Hasbro's customer service site, and it turned out that it only needed batteries. The thought just never occurred to me that all of the power juice could possibly have been drained since she only got it for Christmas the day before...such is life...

more to come...