Story of the day: drugs + sleep debt + distracted co-pilot = unexpected side trip.
It would be fun to turn this into Gilligan's Island, but nothing even remotely scary or life impacting happened. I was mostly in the driving zone, so I kept the helm for the entire trip. The head cold has not improved substantially, but neither has is worsened.
The kids both remained patient and were not fussing over video choices. Both were a little sleepy but we tried to take stops at intervals which were conducive to potty breaks and not sitting too long. Some of the entertaining kid-led sing-along sessions were amusing! :) It is fun to see the kids interacting and playing together even in the confines of a 2 day car trip.
Unfortunately, our side-trip began shortly after starting out for the day. Two state highways out of town join together and then somehow magically split apart. Our maps didn't show enough detail and the directions from online resources seemed to give enough detail that we may have been overly confident of the visibility of our pending split.
We did question our sanity a couple of times as all we saw along the highway were parked pickups and the occasional speeders. The volume of traffic seemed low, but it was fairly early on a Sunday morning, so the situation was plausible. What finally stuck and had us check was crossing an interstate junction that we did not expect to cross after our first pit stop for the day. Grab the atlas and cue-up the forehead slaps. We had not managed the split of the highways correctly.
After a little re-route planning and a big u-turn, we were back on the way. One nice thing about this trip is that, although long, there are big stretches of driving where you're just on one highway or interstate with no need to do anything but drive. There are very few junctions to catch or towns to navigate. The latter point is also a little sad in that you don't have much of an opportunity to spot what life might be like or catch an unexpected local event of interest. Maybe when the kids are older we'll go get lost somewhere and spend time learning about people instead of just passing through.
With two days of driving behind us I'm looking forward to some down time. Hopefully I can shake this head cold, recharge the batteries, and enjoy the overdue down-time with family.
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