Our Road Trip to Maryland (Thursday and Friday)

It was an unbelievably foggy morning when Fergus, Quinn and I set out on our adventure. We were driving from home to Germantown, MD (a Washington, D.C. suburb) so that I could see a friend and eventually so that I could see some friends. My very good friend, Stephanie, live in Germantown, MD and she has a 9 year-old boy, Ben. Her daughter, Kate, is 11 and so is still young enough to be willing to hang out with all of us sometimes. Other friends of both Stephanie and me were to be in the D.C. area on the 24th of October so I decided to take a road trip to be able to see them all.
One friend, who had previously only been an on-line connection, was flying to Washington from her home in Phoenix, AZ. I was very excited to meet her IRL.
Anyway, it was, as I have written, a foggy morning. We set off at 6:00 a.m. in order to get there before dinner time.
The boys were AMAZING! They never asked how much longer, they happily played their computer games part of the way, looked at scenery part of the way, and listened to music with me. The whole trip was 11 hours, including two breaks for food. It was their longest car ride ever and I was astounded by how well they managed it.
The sun was shining almost the whole time we drove and we even had the air conditioning on. Apparently the weather in the US was to be as hot as it was in Ontario. It stayed quite warm the whole time we were visiting in Maryland.
Thursday night we went to watch Ben play baseball. Bobby, Ben's dad, is his baseball coach and they have a GREAT team. It is hardball/fastball so the pitching was slightly different than what we saw at Ferg's games in the summer but otherwise it felt very familiar to be sitting on the sidelines watching young boys play ball.
Friday was a rainy day. What could we do? Kate and Ben had a day off school and so were available to tag along with us. We chose the National Aquarium in Baltimore, MD. The only catch was how we would transport the lot of us? Both Stephanie and I have vehicles to seat 5 and we were 6.

We priced rental vans but they were prohibitively expensive. I joked that it would be great to take a van out for a "test drive" for the day and laughed that the only catch would be that we would have to have the sales associate from the dealership with us so it would have to be someone fun. I got this idea from a commercial on the radio here over the summer wherein a sales associate was calling his office to "check in" and the womyn answering the phone claimed he had been out on this "test drive" for two days already.

Stephanie took the proverbial ball and ran with it. Both she and Bobby have purchased their vehicles, and a previous vehicle, from one sales associate in a neighbouring town. She called him up to put this idea to him. He offered us a Saturn Outlook (?) -- I could be wrong with the name -- and we happily jumped in to head off to Baltimore.

The kids had a great time at the Aquarium. There were loads of living ocean creatures as well as exhibits of fish, water-mammals, reptiles, and more from around the world. We finished our trip off with a Dolphin Show! The boys sat right up close in a hope to get themselves wet. It didn't happen but they wished hard anyway.

It was a long day but it was GREAT! The ride home was certainly more quiet that the ride there.