The Mouse/Vacation

Today while I was walking out the back door taking J to school, we found a dead mouse. This time it wasn't I church it was at my own house! I looked around and thought "well Sasha didn't secretly get out of the house to kill it." Then I wondered if a renegade cat came into the yard to kill the mouse. I wondered if perhaps, it would have been a squirrel picking a fight with a mouse. Nah, squirrels and mice are somewhat related aren't they? Then I looked toward the dog's pen. Mario. He must have killed the mouse. The dog deserves a special reward today a big bone or extra time out of the pen. He is earning his keep here.
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Planning a vacation when the kids used to be so easy. We would just take a whole bunch of toys and go down the road to our destination. We used to get fancy and bring a little TV with a VCR. Then we bought a DVD player for trips which still gets used quite frequently when we travel to Larry Town. We knew if we went during the summer out to the NW then we could spend time with family far away. It usually takes us 3 days of traveling where we could see sights like the Great Salt Lake, the Snake river, Multnomah Falls, Pike's Peak. We knew which hotels to stay in and what was around there (restaurants, etc.). But now our kids are older and family vacation will soon become a distant memory.

Our family in the NW has baseball commitments and we have school commitments. We have to carefully plan when is the best time to go out to the NW and how long we will stay. Lately, we have just having short vacations around the area as the price of gas skyrockets out of control like it did this year. Next year is when I am hoping we can take our "family vacation" to the NW. It will have been three years since the last vacation there. After that, S will be looking toward her junior/senior years of high school and then there is college. I doubt that S will want to go on a "family vacation" when she is in college. All of our resources and monies will be going to finance an education for her. Then after she is done with college, J will soon follow.

The road trip is the "cheapest" way to go out there for us. I did some pricing on airline tickets out there. Quite expensive, depending on which airport that you leave from. Flying would cut down the time constraints of the road trip. It may be what we will be looking forward to in the distant future.

It is tough to see the family from the NW when they live so far away and they don't travel to little old Kansas by road or by plane.

Frustrating.