A little background. We have a grandson, Matthew, and a granddaughter, Aubrey from our son, Rick and his wife, Laura, who live in Victoria, where we live. The are 12 and 11, respectively and are 360 days apart in birth.
Our daughter, Deanne, and her husband, Mike have one child, our granddaughter, Rachel, who just turned 6 in March.
Patsy and I have always traveled with Matthew and Aubrey……. probably from the age of 2. We have a great relationship with our daughter-in-law, who I hope doesn’t read this post, and she has been really good at sharing the kids with us. They are allowed to spend nights at home with us and travel a lot with us. We have friends, RV’ing types and others, who seldom get to spend time alone with their grandkids!! I guess we are lucky, but I’ve been lucky all my life!
For the last 5 summers, Patsy and I have packed up Matthew and Aubrey and taken them to Little Rock for a week to 10 days to spend time with Rachel. We wanted the cousins to really know each other. We also spend Christmas together …. sometimes in Little Rock and others in Victoria.
For those 5 summers, we would park in a campground in Little Rock and do things around the city…….. water parks, zoo, Clinton Library (reluctantly!!), and other local fun things!
This year, I decided that the kids needed a road trip to start seeing the United States! The first obstacle was Grammie, who thought that Rachel would be upset being away from “Mommy” for a couple of weeks. However, I out argued that one, and she gave in!
The next obstacle was “Mommy”, Deanne, who also tried to lay it on Rachel, but the argument did not hold water…… It was Mommy who did not want to lose Rachel for a whole week! It did start out being two weeks, but a schedule conflict with summer ‘camps’ for Rachel kind of limited it to one week. I considered 2 weeks reduced to only 1 week, was my compromise, and convinced Deanne to give it a try!
I did a lot of maintenance on the Bus to get it ready, and one of those chores was to clean and wax the fiberglass roof. Aubrey helped me………
We left Victoria on Wednesday afternoon and drove to El Campo, TX and picked up Aubrey from ‘cheer practice’ at 5:00pm. We ate food that we picked up at my favorite Bakery/Deli, Prasek’s, in Hillje TX for supper, and then drove until 11:00pm, arriving in Marshall, TX and overnighting on a Walmart Parking lot.
Matthew and Aubrey transferring their ‘stuff’ from Laura’s car to the Bus…….
We arrived at our regular campground in Little Rock, Downtown Riverside RV Park about 1:00pm on Thursday, and met Rachel and Deanne at a local swimming pool that they belong to. We had been avoiding the bad weather from Tropical Storm Cindy from Victoria to Little Rock, but it caught up with us at the swimming pool. At first we were delayed, and finally had to leave early.
We transferred Rachel’s car seats and luggage from Deanne’s car to mine, and then met Mike at the kid’s favorite Burger place……… The Purple Cow for dinner.
Matthew had a chocolate malt with his burger….
That night, Aubrey and Rachel got their bed set up and began having fun….
Before we could get on the road on Friday morning, we had to take Rachel to her school for the last day of a soccer camp. We took some pictures………..
At noon, we left Little Rock, and headed to Memphis for two nights at the Tom Sawyer RV Park, located on the Mississippi River. We had a site reserved directly on the river where we could watch the barges being moved up and down the riverway.
More on our two days in Memphis in the next post!
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