Headed Home

We left Virginia Saturday to head home. In our original plans, we were going to see a couple of places on the way home, but we've been to the southern states many times, so we decided to just drive straight through. We were super excited to see Mommy and Jacob and the kids did not want to stop for anything.

This is our campsite at Chippokes Plantation State Park just before we headed out.

Our 20th state.

21st state.

22nd state. The kids don't seem sick of taking these pictures yet. They are good sports about it.

We spent the night in a Walmart parking lot just off of I-85 near the town of Commerce which is east of Atlanta inside the Georgia border. It was the first time for us to do this and, while we felt perfectly safe, with no electricity there is no air conditioner, heater, or fan to drown out the sounds outside and cars screeched through the parking lot until early in the morning. But, free is free. We ate dinner that night at a Waffle House just down the street that we walked to. It was super cold walking down there and back.

This is a picture of where we spent the night the next morning just before we pulled out. Strange, but Stacey had called for us to verify that it was OK to spend the night there, yet there were signs everywhere saying you cannot spend the night. Not sure what to make of that.

Since we gained an hour yesterday traveling into the central time zone, I decided to push far to make sure that we got home today before Jacob went to sleep. We drove almost 700 miles yesterday and made it just inside the Texas border on I-20. We slept at the Texas welcome center with about 30 other trucks.

None of us had ever heard of this place, but it's a typical chicken and fries type of place. You get biscuits too. It was pretty good.

We pulled into Liberty Hill about 2:00, so we went straight to Stacey's classroom to surprise her. She knew we'd make it in today, but thought it would be this evening. Her kindergarten students must have thought something was wrong because we all cried a little bit. Adria is buried in there somewhere.

Jacob was happy to see us, but had a little bit of a startled reaction. I think he was thrown off that all of a sudden we were all there and met him on the playground. He hadn't seen us for about six weeks, but it didn't take him long to warm up. The kids (and I) have missed him so much.

After 25 states, 57 days, and 6615 miles, we finally made it back home. We've had an amazing time and got to see some incredible places. While it hasn't been a two month vacation, it has been an unbelievable opportunity and I feel blessed that we were able to do it. 

We'll stay home for only about 2.5 weeks and then we're back on the road heading west, first to meet my brother and his family in New Mexico not too far from where they live in El Paso.