Monday, April 20, 2015

Snacks? Check

Every good road trip has snacks.  Not just snacks though but snacks you enjoy and snacks a plenty.

When I was a kid this concept did not exist and neither did stopping at Burger King or McDonalds or any other popular fast food restaurant.  My parent's ideas of snacks was sandwiches made at home that were not anywhere near our favorite.  Example Liverwurst (the poor man's pate), egg salad, tuna fish.  Today I actually enjoy any of these options but as a kid THEY WERE THE WORST!!!!!

So I asked the kids to make a list of snacks and beverages they enjoy so that we could ensure they have what they need for the almost 2000 round trip excursion we would be taking.  
 

I pretty much got all their food stuff on these lists and then when we picked up Isabel she also had 3 bags of food.

So if you see us on the road and need a snack.  We got you

Friday, April 17, 2015

Road Trip 2015

When I  was much younger my dad used to take us on road trips some of them planned, most of them not.  Like the time we were going to visit our family in Boston and we ended up in Maine.  Of course this was well before the days of cell phones, gps and stopping to ask for directions were the norm.  Yeah my dad NEVER stopped and asked for directions.  That is how that one hour trip to Boston turned into a 6 hour trip to Maine.  

While in my childhood I never really appreciated those trips, the times he would tell us to get in the car we were going to go for a ride and then we would end up in Western Massachusetts or Connecticut.  It wasn't until I was much older that I truly realized those long days (sometimes evenings) in the car driving planted in me a love for the road.  To experience sites you see from the window of a car, playing car games, falling asleep in one state waking up in another and then of course asking "Are we there yet?"

As an adult I have traveled, 5 years ago, the reason I started this blog was my around the world adventure.  Since then I have very infrequently had an entry to this blog, however I hope this entry and the seed that it plants will change that. 

Today I  will embark on a Spring Break Tour with my co worker her 9 year old son.  My nieces; Jasmine 13 and Maya 12.  Nephews Omani 10 and Alex 8. Its an old fashioned "Road Trip"  We are loading up the mini van (read "a decked out Honda Odyssey") and hitting the road.  

The purpose of our road trip is an educational trip visiting many of the sites where Martin Luther King Jr. made a great impact and changed the course of civil rights in this country.  It was Jasmine's interest in Civil Rights heroes that planted the seed which gave birth to this idea of doing a trip.  Our MLK Tour will start in Atlanta at his homestead and we will visit Ebenezer Baptist Church as well as the King Center. Our plan is to continue on to Alabama and visit the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery as well as the Pettus Bridge in Selma, our tour will then take us on to Memphis, TN and the Lorraine Motel and the adjoining Civil Rights museum. We then will head to Washington DC and visit the MLK Monument and tour other grand monuments and sights in Washington DC ending our visit with a tour of the Capitol Building as guests of Congressman Langevin. We hope the Congressman will be able to meet with us. 

We hope you follow our journey, I will be posting here, on FB and on my twitter @awbarraza
Looking forward to seeing as many of you as we can along the way. (Read: help me maintain my sanity)