Travelling, GPS and other fun!

Travelling was a lot of fun. Jennifer wrote up a scavenger before we left. There were things on there like purple house, white horse, 860 Massey combine, dead skunk, bear, semi that honks, person wearing a winter jacket, someone talking on a cell phone......and the list went on and on. Joshua was the winner and his prize is still pending. We were dissappointed we could not cross off a bear.

We didn't travel very many hours at a time, our longest stretch was 8 hours. We had along lots of books, colorings (as the boys call them) and such, but really they only played with cars.
The older kids and Mark ate a few bags of 'spits'.
We played the alphabet game a couple of times, listened to some story tapes, teaching tapes and lots o' praise and worship.

We sometimes ate our lunch in the van but usually for meals we would park beside a playground, pull out our awning and made our meal right there. The boys loved all the different playgrounds we visited!

One thing you have to know about me is I hate reading maps. In fact I am very bad at reading maps and giving instructions! And Mark is quite the opposite. He can look at a map once, instantly get perspective of where he wants to go and how to get there. I think it is because of the first initials of his name Mark Alan Pauls. There you have it MAP. I was not blessed with such initials, I can RAP though!!!! So needless to say there were a couple of 'tense, dense' moments along the way.
So in Calgary we replaced my bad map skills with a GPS. We had fun with that on the way home. But even that had it's challenges. I thought GPS would do all the work for me and I could just sit back and repeat what it said and we would get to our destination by the shortest quickest route. But I found out the hard way that this was simply not true! As we left the campground at Drumheller we typed in Moose Jaw as our destination. As we got to the main road we GPS hadn't quite told us which way to turn so Mark turned left and waited for further instruction. So as we drove and GPS finally got his act together and said in so and so kms turn right. We came up to the road and it was gravel, Mark figured that was strange, but maybe this was the shortest route. Then GPS said the next turn was a mile, turn right, still on a gravel road, Mark was now getting unimpressed, the next mile turn...... right. Mark is saying, "this is not right (meaning it was wrong), we are going in circles!" I said, "Just trust the GPS!" So he did and we ended up right back on the highway where we started. We had went around the block on country roads! But the GPS had succeeded in one very important thing, it turned us around! And I learned a very important lesson about not totally putting my trust in GPS and actually looking at the route he wanted to take us and make sure I understood what it wants to do! Mark figured he could have turned around in a much simpler way, go figure :) You see our very first turn out of the campground should have been a right, but we turned left before it told us so! So the moral of the story is GPS is great, but you still can't turn your brain off! Too bad for me!

So this concludes the chapter of our Family Vacation 2007. I hope you have enjoyed the little tidbits that we have shared!

Have a great day, stay cool and.....read a map!