Today was another pretty long driving day. I booked a site at Cedar Point for Thursday and Friday night. That left us a little over six hours of driving for Thursday.
One reason I took the northern route using I-94 home was that I wanted to avoid taking I-90 through downtown Chicago. Traffic on I-90 in Chicago is miserable in a car, and I didn’t really want to navigate it in the motorhome. With the time crunch to get to Youngstown by Saturday and an aim to have a little fun time on the tail end of the trip, it was unfortunately infeasible to continue on I-94 into northern Michigan and catch I-75 south to Ohio. It just added too many miles.
All the driving over the last three days in combination with a 7-hour BOE meeting on Monday, had put me in an easily irritated frame of mind from the start of driving on Thursday. Hitting the Chicago Loop at morning rush hour only made things worse. The long drives and BOE meeting also seemed to put the boys in a less than stellar mood. The drive to Cedar Point involved me repeatedly — at increasing intensity— asking them to be quiet. Eventually, they were tasked with “pretending they were trees” and then “pretending they were trees without mouths.” No one was happy on the drive.
To add to my irritability, this was the day we discovered how long we could go without plugging into electric before the cabin battery was completely drained. The battery was low when we woke up, which led to issues with the refrigerator pilot light for the gas. We discovered the battery was dead when — during an emergency Will “big boy potty break” on I-90 in Indiana — the water pump wouldn’t work because there was no juice left. This is definitely the event from the road trip I would most like to purge from my memory. Not a good day for any of us.
Things got better once we got set up at the Lighthouse Park Campground at Cedar Point. Once we were set up, we headed to the pool. Seeing the kids running around having fun at the pool, tossing them around a bit in the pool, and talking to a nice couple whose kids were also playing in the pool about our long road trip and parenting made everything in the world seem alright again.
We had a fun late night dinner at the TGI Friday’s in the Hotel Breakers, which seemed like a Michelin Five Star Restaurant after eating at a Denny’s at a truck stop in Wisconsin the night before. We ended the night with a walk back to the RV that took us through the park. We chatted about which of the rides we would go on tomorrow, and I jokingly threatened them with putting them on the big rollercoasters. Life was pretty much back to normal.
Professor No More 
Sounds like a lot of driving again. I guess no one likes that but now things seem better. I hope you’ll have fun at the park and at the family reunion. Miss you guys.
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