The vacation in my mind

If I could pick one of my favorite things in the world, sleeping in would be pert near the top of that list.

That might possibly make me sound lazy, but it's true. I love it. I don't always get to, but this fine Saturday morning, my hubby was home, and so he took care of Savananh while I blissfully snoozed away part of the morning.

At 9:15 I was half-awake and I heard him tell Savannah that they were going to take a walk. I sprang out of bed in my fuzzy state - fuzzy brain, fuzzy hair, fuzzy teeth - and stumbled to the living room where they stared at me as I announced that I wanted to go with them.

There is a truck stop about a half-mile or so away from our house, and this is where we occasionally rent our $1 Redbox movies. (Whoever invented Redbox? Genius.) We rented a couple of movies last night - Slumdog Millionaire for us, Dora for Savannah - and so they were just going to walk down the road and return them.

They waited for me to throw on some clothes and brush my teeth, and then we set off on our walk. It had rained all day yesterday, but this morning was bright and beautiful. There was a slight chill in the air so we wrapped Savannah in a blanket.

There is something....I don't know, special, I guess, about doing something with your family that you don't normally do. We take walks in the evening, but walking to a truck stop at 9:30 in the morning is not usually on our daily list of activities. We had to cross a busy street to reach it, and we were surrounded by the roar of semi-trucks speeding past.

We haven't taken a road trip in a long, long time, but just walking into the parking lot of that truck stop made me want to drop everything and drive to California. Or Pennsylvania. Or Idaho. Anywhere.

We returned our movies, and then Ricardo wanted to go look around inside. So we joined all of the travelers from everywhere wandering around and we wandered, too, looking at all of the over-priced packages of gummy bears and dried fruit, bratwursts riding a sizzling carousel under a hot light and cases of stale donuts. (To which Savannah said, "Hey, donuts! Can I have a treat?" Umm....no..) A lady walked by with a bag full of licorice, cherry red and green apple, and a guy stood at the coffee dispensing machine, and taste-tested all of the different flavors available, glancing around to see if anybody was watching him.

We didn't buy anything, just looked and people watched, and then left five minutes later. We walked away and I told Ricardo, "All truck stops are the same, aren't they? Don't you feel like you've just been on a little vacation?"

He smiled and nodded.

And then we walked back to our house, home from our mini-vacation.