Boston

I am writing from a hotel room in Boston. Our plan was to camp tonight just north of Boston but it has been raining all day and is forecast to rain all night and maybe all day again tomorrow. I normally love this kind of steady, driving rain but not when I'm on vacay. I must say though that after 2 nights of camping (one of them a wet one) and a day at Hersheypark, all without a shower...this hotel room was very welcome as was the shower! Camping is great fun but it's dirty. My plan is to start uploading pics here in a bit and I'll start from day one of our trip but since I might not get very far I thought I'd just write a quick post in the present tense. I cannot believe all the traffic in and around Boston--that plus rain has made it interesting. We drove into the city tonight and visited the Bunker Hill Monument in the rain. We actually ate our dinner on the steps of the monument under a small patch of shelter. I'm disappointed that we will likely not see the city without the rain but we'll take what we can get. Ollie and I will be shopping for ponchos on the way downtown tomorrow morning. Thankfully, the kids have great raincoats and I even remembered to pack them. Speaking of packing...this has become my least favorite daily chore. We are completely crammed into the car and everyday it seems I end up with more stuff in my lap or at my feet. We have only brought along what is needed and we all seriously skimped on clothes--you will see the same outfits over and over and day after day in the pictures. In just a bit I'll be going through the travel activity bags I packed for the kids and dumping some stuff--they are mostly messing around with each other, listening to iPods, and drawing. I could've saved a whole bunch of space at their feet by not packing so much for them to do. I had some big ideas about how they would all do some math everyday but that has so not happened. There has been very little downtime aside from driving and I'm not brave enough to be trapped in the car with my 3 kids while they are doing math. Not one of them has inherited a love of math from me. I'm tempted to just dump the math notebook...I can reprint it all when I get home...but we'll see.
We are having a great time--there have been lots of ups and a few downs as is normal on a family vacation. As you will see in the posts to come though there are no pictures of the down times. In every picture we look like the happy American family enjoying a blissful vacation together. Don't be fooled. :0)