Cross Country...

"Morning.  It's morning everyone!  Today's the day!  

The sun is shining, the tank is clean and we are going to get out of...

The tank is clean.

(gasp)

The TANK is CLEAN!!!"

-Peaches, Finding Nemo

Well, today is the day, and the sun is shining,

but the tank is not clean.

We are headed off on our cross country road trip today, 

and sadly I find myself stressing about the fact that my house is not clean.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so anything less than perfect is well... a trial in and of itself.

But I must get over the fact that my house is not perfectly coifed.

For the next ten plus days we will be more or less living out of a van.

Yesterday we drove all the way up to Salt Lake City Airport to rent a van for this trip.

The drive alone was a catastrophe.

Fenix started bawling the minute we got into the car.

Lyon could not just leave her alone, at one point I glanced in the rearview mirror to see him laying on his seat and kicking at Fenix with his feet!

Lyon found entertainment in pestering her.

Bear asked every five seconds how much longer until we got there.

And whined pretty much the whole time.

It was sweet relief when Lyon and Fenix both fell asleep.

The whole time I fought off the panic of knowing that we were on a very short jaunt compared to what we'll be heading off on today.

Well we made it to the airport, parked the car, and headed to the rentals.

We needed to rent through National car rentals which is why we went all the way up to the airport.

In the past when we've rented a vehicle we've gone out to a parking lot, picked out a vehicle loaded up and pretty much were on our way.

The selection this time was sparse, we needed to be sure to get a van, nothing else would capable of providing for our needs for this trip.

At the very end of the lot we found two vans,

a Toyota and a Kia.

We chose the Toyota of course.

We loaded up and were pretty well set to leave when Superman found that there was no key in the ignition.  This was new.

He headed out back down the lot to talk to National car rental.

An hour later he came back.

With bad news.

We couldn't rent a van.

They'd let us pay extra to rent a crossover, but that wasn't going to work.

Turns out renting a mini van in Salt Lake county is not nearly as easy as you'd think it'd be.

They just don't carry many mini vans.

I was totally weirded out by this, seeing as this is practically mini van country.

But whatever...

Superman decided that the kids and I had had enough.

We were hungry, hot, and tired.

He sent us home.

I protested that if we left and he wasn't able to find a mini van up at the airport I'd have to come back and get him.  He sent us on our way anyway.

I drove all the way down to nearly the point of the mountain where I stopped to get the kids Happy meals and to take Fenix to the bathroom.

That's when Superman called.

After many calls and a thousand different rental companies he'd finally found a mini van 

at Enterprise rentals in West Valley.

I'd have to drive back up to the airport.

I'd planned to spend the day prepping for our trip.

As it was, I'd spent the entire day on the excursion to get a mini van.

The one we ended up with is nice and has a lot of great features, 

but it is DIRTY!!!

Animal hair, soda spills, smashed candy, etc...

Oh the horror.

We just didn't have time to have the rental agency get it any cleaner than they attempted to.

I drove it home.

Had an angel (My Mother-in-law) take my kids for the evening.

And I took the van to Wiggy Wash.

Though I'm not a big fan of their prices and lack of perfection in cleaning interiors,

I just couldn't bring myself to spend an hour cleaning it myself.

They did an okay job, not perfect, there is still soda spill on the middle console and a bit of dust on the dashboard....

Oh well...

Today's the day!

The sun is shining,

the tank isn't clean, 

and we are gonna get out of here!