Day 1: Wisconsin and Illinois. Illinois never ends.

When we planned this trip I didn't really know what I was doing. Old Sara would have planned this entire trip out so much better, she would have had activity bags, planned stops, fun car games to play, and I would have had hotel ideas planned all along the way.

By me saying this you can safely assume that I had none of this and that we winged it. And it's true. We absolutely winged it. We survived, but it was trying and maybe not the smartest thing a person weaning off of an anti-depressant medication to do. 

What? Oh yes, as it turns out we think the culprit for my tingly and numbness could very well be the Topomax that I've been on, my psychiatrist thinks it's actually messing with my nervous system in a bad way so the plan was for me to start weaning myself off of that but increase my Strattera to help with my tiredness and cognition. But when we left on Friday, I felt good. 

 Penelope was clearly ready to go.

Olivia and Jackson were ready to go. Lucy was happy and ready.

We got kind of a later start than I wanted but that was because we ate breakfast at out usual time and packed the van, got everyone loaded up and we hit the road!

By the time we got to southern Wisconsin people were starting to already getting antsy which isn't a good sign considering how far we had to go. So we got out at a rest stop, and let the two little ones burn some energy.

Which, shout out to Wisconsin for having play structures at some of the rest stops because this is a BIG deal. You don't realize this unless you're in a car with a couple of kids who are in desperate need of burning some energy. They went down the slide, climbed a little bit, and we played in the well maintained grassy picnic area.

It was one of the nicest rest stops we stopped at, aside from the one in Florida, and that's saying something because we stopped at quite a few.

You can tell that by the time we got to Illinois, which was around dinner time, we were all kind of tired of driving.

Except me. I was doing a really good job. Yup, I was actually driving the first leg. I decided that I would drive highway portions and when it came to us driving in a city I would leave that to Matt because that would be really difficult for me. So I wanted to do as much as I could to feel normal and do what Old Sara would do. Old Sara would have powered through this road trip, no problem. 

We drove and we drove. We drove until about 10:00 p.m. until finally I looked at Matt and said I couldn't go any further. He agreed and we decided we would try our hand at winging it with a hotel. As it turns out, we were in the middle of nowhere Illinois so we stopped off at the first exit because wherever we were was remote and there didn't appear to be anything anywhere sooner. The exit ended up only having one hotel option with a room price under $200 (our goal out of necessity was to not pay over $100 for a room because when I say this trip was on a budget, I'm not joking). It ends up being a Holiday Inn Express and at first sight, not bad. Smells a little odd, but the front desk person was very kind, gave us a "corporate rate" and wheeled up a crib before we got the suitcase out of the van and it was great.

We all crashed. In the morning, my plan was to take a shower because I felt so gross. 

Then we saw the shower head, which hadn't been cleaned in weeks and no thanks. Absolutely not. We just packed our stuff and left. In fact, I didn't even change my clothes because I realized I didn't plan well and didn't pack enough of anything so I realized that driving days? I would be wearing the same clothes.

Oh! And after a quick check by Matt we discovered I had the worst diaper rash under my left boob. Odd, right? That's what I thought. Apparently between my new bra and the seat belt pushing my boob down, plus the heat/humidity it was the right environment to bread a nasty rash. To the point where I was in desperate need of diaper rash cream and it had to be a priority stop before we got going on the road.

But little Penelope proved to be a professional traveler. Hauling her own things in and out of hotels with ease. I learned on this trip to just ignore her because she is going to have a full melt down no matter what you do so you need to just go with it and hope that other people don't stare too much.

So that was our first day. Lots of driving and diaper rash.