200K and Counting

Summers meant road trips when I was growing up. It was most often my mom driving 5 kids from Tucson to Grand Junction, CO to visit my paternal grandparents. Or mom driving 5 kids from Tucson to Anaheim, CA to visit my maternal grandparents. The first trips I can remember were taken in a Ford Grenada. And then we had a Chevy Citation hatchback. The Chevy might have had air-conditioning, but the Ford definitely did not. To help pass the time, mom employed a variety of tricks. When we were really little, she'd start real early in the morning. She'd move us all to the car and then we would promptly fall right back to sleep. When we woke, she always had books on tape for us. As we grew, and could read on our own, we had books from the library to read. She also taught us how to read road signs. As our math skills developed, she would have us figure out just how long it was until we got to our destination. We would also figure out how much distance had passed between road signs, how far to the next town, etc. Mom also made sure to stop a rest stops. And that we read any informational signs at the rest stop. Another thing mom always did was notify us of when the odometer was getting to roll-over. She made sure we noticed at the 100's, 1000's, and 10,000's. That was my favorite part of the trip--watching the zero's roll-over. So for the past few weeks, I have been giving the kids the count-down to the Honda rolling over to 200,000. Carson especially seemed to like the count-down. I was trying to make sure that we were all together when it hit 200K. But, I missed. The Honda rolled to 200K as I was on my way to the gym on Friday morning and I was all by myself. I was disappointed that I didn't have anyone to share that with and Carson was bummed that he missed hit. I did take a picture of the odometer on my cell phone, but Katelyn is now the proud owner of that phone and she promptly deleted the picture not recognizing the significance of it. Oh well.