Trip to Alabama, part one: on the road......

First.......congratulations, Corie and Pat!! You've made it through one week of marriage!!!Corie looked so beautiful on her wedding day.....more about that later.....I have to break up our trip into sections or else I will have a REALLY long post!

We are back! We had a really fun trip to Corie and Pat's wedding in Alabama. It was our first trip as a family of four....we DROVE over 700 miles to Birmingham, stopping in Baton Rouge on our first night. I was really unsure how the car ride would go, since Drew is not a big fan of his carseat. And I was even more nervous about staying in the hotel rooms, since Grant has never done well outside of his own bed and his own room. We had some really late nights......about 10-11pm was the normal bedtime for Grant. Yikes! He is the master at using stall tactics to stay awake. But we survived and had a great time. And Drew learned the art of falling asleep in his carseat quite well!

A couple of pictures from the first couple of days on the road. I sat in the backseat between the boys for some of the trip (thank you, minivan...I never could have done this in our Pathfinder!). It allowed me to feed Drew and try to keep him happy when he started getting fussy. Grant asked to watch Lightning McQueen ("I wanna watch Li Queen!") every time we got in the car. We were thinking today that he probably watched Cars, on average, about once per day on our trip. That boy stays completely glued to the TV when that movie is on......I'll point out school buses or tractors (things he loves to look at), and he will barely turn his head to glance at them, before darting his eyes back to the screen. He has even started quoting lines from the movie!!

Some pictures from the first couple of days on the road.....

Here's Grant at our hotel room in Baton Rouge making coffee! He loves helping me make coffee in the mornings, and he had SO much fun with this little coffee maker.
Watching Cars the next morning.....

We stopped at a National Park in Mississippi to take a break. Most of our stops were very ill-timed (once we stopped basically on the side of the road for twenty minutes to let Grant get out and run around, and so that I could feed Drew. Then we got back on the road and two miles later passed a city park with a playground that would have been perfect!). Anyway.....this was actually a good stop, because it had a beautiful lake and this playground. The boys had fun!
Later that day, we drove into Tuscaloosa and Grant had fun playing on campus. Here are some pictures from the quad.....so pretty!! As an Aggie, I must admit that Alabama's campus is a lot prettier than ours!
Okay, more later on the actual wedding festivities.......