Home Like the Wise Men

Normally I wouldn't devote an entire blog post to coming home from vacation, because, well...ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

But we had to carry the craziness of this trip all the way to the very moment we pulled in our driveway, so I shall tell you.

As we drove to Ohio the week before, we drove through a crazy long stretch of road construction. Our side of the interstate slowed to a normal highway speed, but we kept moving. And as we drove, we watched the poor people coming toward us just sitting on their side. We knew there wasn't an accident, because we'd seen the front of the line. It was just a construction crawl that had stopped.

Ryan isn't a fan of sitting on the road. So we decided as we made our way toward vacation that when we returned home, we would take a lesson from the wise men and come home via a different route.

We also happened to think about the possibility of finding a Duck Donuts while we were out. You know how we love us some Duck Donuts. We discovered there was a location on the north side of Columbus, so we decided to come home that way, drive up farther north in Ohio, and then cut across to Indiana.

The best laid plans, right?

We got up Monday morning, packed up our cabin (for real this time, not just for the state park) and said our goodbyes.

We wanted to make one more stop at that little coffee shop we'd visited earlier in the trip, so we decided to have breakfast there and get some coffee for the road.

As you may remember, we always get a Christmas ornament on our trips, so we can add to our family Christmas tree story. Since none of the parks we went to had any sort of office or gift shop, the only place we'd seen ornaments happened to be this coffee shop. Ryan was ready to buy it when we got our breakfast, but I was still deciding on whether or not I also wanted a coffee mug, so I asked if we could wait until after we'd eaten.

Breakfast was delicious.

I decided against the coffee mug, so after breakfast, Ryan bought the ornament, and we got on the road!

About an hour after we left the coffee shop, we arrived at Duck Donuts. They didn't have any inside seating, but that was okay, because we were just going to get the donuts and leave.

I had to go to the bathroom, so while Ryan ordered, I disappeared. When I came back, he said, "I need your credit card. Mine's gone."

WHAT????

Ryan said not to worry - he knew he had it that morning at the coffee shop. So after we got our donuts, we ripped apart the car to see if it had fallen in a crack, and it hadn't. Ryan called the coffee shop, and sure enough, they had it! Apparently when he bought the ornament, he accidentally left his card in the machine. He has NEVER done that before! He said it didn't beep at him. I guess those annoying beeps must actually serve a purpose! We were too far away to drive all the way back to the coffee shop and start the trip over, so we canceled the card and asked for a new one.

Armed with donuts for later, we got back on the road and began again.

We stopped for lunch a little bit later and zoomed right over the state line back into Indiana:

And found this.

The road we were on when we entered Indiana should have taken us straight through to our very own town. Except about five miles into the state, we saw the road closed sign. Took the detour and got on another road.

It, too, closed. Took that detour and got on another road.

You guessed it! Closed!

By that time, we were fairly close to the interstate, so we got on that, and immediately it went down to one lane and stayed that way the entire time we were on it.

I think by the time we got home, we'd added a full hour to our trip - and we don't even know how many miles.

But we didn't sit in a construction backup!!

And we had donuts!! 

The credit card is now fixed, and we're tacking an automatic 20 minutes onto any out-of-town trip because we presume Indiana is fixing ALL the roads at once right now. ;)