This was our weekend at Carowinds, so we headed out to Charlotte to stay in the Amerisuites overnight and spend Saturday at Carowinds.
We left at 6:30pm and got to the hotel just after midnight. Traffic? No way! Babies! Actually, here’s how the adventure went…
We left at 6:30 and drove for about an hour, stopping at exit 141 in Burlington. Cracker Barrell was obviously too busy, as were Chilis and Applebees, so we kept going up the road and found Ruby Tuesdays. They got us in within minutes.
The girls woke up the moment we got into Ruby Tuesdays, so we heated up a bottle and fed them it while we dined. They were awake the whole time and each at a 4oz bottle over the course of the hour and a half we were there. We were certainly a sight for comments! 😉 It’s always funny how people try to be quiet, but we still hear their comments. Abby and Emily, of course were living it up, smiling at strangers and being little hams. 🙂 Some people did stop and ask questions, but not too many.
We packed up and got going and within 2 miles we stopped again — this time at the rest stop in Burlington (on I-40). Both girls were being fussy and wouldn’t fall back to sleep. After quite some time, we figured they were still hungry, so I fed them — which means the van goes no where — and we wait.
Another 45 minutes passed and we very quickly packed up the girls and got back on the road. They stayed in a zonked state until well after we got settled in our hotel room.
Joseph, on the other hand, watched both Inspector Gadget (the movie) and SpiderMan on our DVD system while we drove — it’s an awesome system. Our Nav system is great, too. When we reached Hwy 77 in Charlotte, they had blocked off the exit to 77 from 85 and had a detour. Of course traffic was backed up like crazy and we didn’t have a clue how long it would last.
So, Ron set the nav system to not use freeways and we continued on our merry way through the back roads of Charlotte until we hit 77 again and there wasn’t any traffic this time, so we jumped on it. Very very useful!!
We finally reached the hotel just after midnight and boy am I glad we had a reservation! There was a cheerleading convention at Carowinds for the following day and the hotel was booked(!) with, guess what? Teenagers! One young girl saw me carrying both babies and said “I bet you get a workout doing that.” 🙂
When we got into the hotel, Joseph pleaded with us to let him watch yet another movie, to which our response was ‘no way, you’re tired’. He said he wasn’t, we said he was, etc. etc. So, we told him to just lay down for a minute and guess what? Crash! He was out in probably under 5 minutes. 🙂
The girls, on the other hand, woke up several times. I had them sleep with me. So I didn’t have to worry about one or the other falling off the bed, Ron and I pushed the bed against the wall. That worked well, except that the girls were restless and ended up waking up several times each during the night. A couple times, they woke up at the same time, so needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep.
All in all the trip down was fine, just really long, but with babies that sleep and a boy who watches movies and a hubby with a navigation system, we were set!
So, can you guess what our wake-up-call was in the morning?