On a whim, we packed our bags, loaded the car, and took to the road for a seventeen-hour car trip. We had discussed the possibility of going but didn't decide to do it until two days before we left. After all, it was the kids' spring break, and the only time they'd get to see their future home town before actually moving there.

Military spouses should be sent to school to acquire skills for handling long journeys with children. Why not? Our active duty spouses are sent to trainings for innumerable other reasons. We are stationed in far-flung places all over the globe which necessitates long distance travel if we are to see our families more often than every three or four years. As it is, we learn while on the job. 

Seventeen hours is nothing. To visit grandparents from our current home, it takes two full days in the car. When we lived in Japan, the normal transit time to their homes was thirty-six hours. The longest my kids and I (my husband was at a training elsewhere) have been in transit was one week. We left our home in Japan and had a 5-day, unplanned stopover in Alaska where we slept in an airport. We caught a hop to Arizona and then left the next day on a plane to St. Louis, a two-hour car trip from our vacation destination. Lest you be tempted to think that only accounts for six days, remember all the endless hours in the air spent entertaining restless kids. You reach your destination only AFTER you've fallen over the edge of insanity.

We lost our minds around one-thirty a.m., with seventy miles to go. I faded in and out of consciousness while my husband, loaded with coffee, licorice, and Dots held steady at the wheel. The kids and dog were gone to the world in the back rows. At two-thirty, seventeen hours after leaving home, we finally kicked it into the driveway at my sister-in-laws' house - not quite to our destination of where we're moving three months from now. But does the journey ever really end?