We headed out on our annual road trip to PEI this morning. It was a slightly more eventful departure in the wee small hours of the morning as the raccoons, who are attempting to move into our attic permanently, showed up for the first time in a week. They sat on the roof and waved goodbye. Jerks. (Actually, I call them much worse things than jerks.) We have people scheduled to come evict them and there's not much to be done in the meantime so away we went.
As we drove along the highway through rural Ontario, we shook off the bitter raccoony feelings. It's hard to hold on to that when you are looking through the mist at a stunning sunrise.
Early birds don't get up for the worm. They get up for the view.
We've done this trip enough that we've got our preparations down to a science. We try hard not to buy much food on the road. A few years ago we did a bunch of road trips and we got sick of fast food. Our cooler today was packed with water, ginger ale, cheese, deli meat, carrot sticks, and grape tomatoes. This year we added in some orange slices. The night before we leave we make pizza and it makes for a great road trip lunch.
We dish everything out in red solo cups. They are awesome because you can stick them in your cup holder.
Solo cup snacks are the best snacks!
Since we've started doing this, we really only have to stop for fuel and bathroom breaks. And coffee. We have our favourite rest stops, including Madrid 2.0. We can't help it. We like the dinosaurs.
Dinosaur. Rawr!
And of course at some point we break into the candy. You need to have candy on a road trip. For this trip we splurged on some fancy gummies. There were orange-banana ones for Lee, and bubbly bears for me.
These bears are made with Prosecco.
We like to stop in Fredericton for the night. Since we leave early in the morning and don't stop often, we find ourselves rolling in around 3:30 local time. That gives us time to get settled into our hotel before dinner and take a post-dinner walk to stretch our legs.
When we stay downtown we like to head over to the newsstand and splurge on magazines and puzzle books. (We were surprised to discover that most of the rest stops we breaker at didn't sell magazines or books. ONroutes have clearly spoiled us.)
Can you guess which of these I won't be reading?
Sometimes after dinner, ice cream happens. Because vacation.
We'll keep things quiet tonight, vegging out and reading. Or maybe we'll pull up Netflix on the iPad. Then tomorrow morning, bright and early, it will be time to get back in the truck for the next leg of the trip.