Day Nine was another "down day". Hubby and I had some obligations, then we just enjoyed the comfort of having our daughter and her daughter visiting us.

Day Ten was a busy day. It started by taking one of our cars to the mechanic, where he will have it for several days while he attempts to find out why it lost freon. No A/C in the car during the hottest weeks of the year is NOT fun! Our next stop was at Sun Diego Car Rentals, to pick up a rental mini-van. We did some calculations and figured that renting a mini-van would be less expensive than taking two cars on our 3-day jaunt and having two cars add 800 miles and paying gas for them. We rented a 7 passenger mini-van, a Ford Freestar. Sun Diego Car Rentals is a local place, so you don't have the backing of a nationwide rental. It also does not allow its vehicles to leave the tri-state area (CA, NV, AZ). They DO have cars available for travel into Mexico (Baja California).

We crammed four adults and two babies in car seats into the mini-van. We didn't get to take everything we wanted to, because mini-vans aren't known for their expansive cargo space. But for the three days, we figured everybody would have to give in a little. It was a walk down memory lane for us. Our daughters, getting ready to go, got into an argument with their dad. Then later, listening to two babies in their car seats, brought back memories of our girls (who were about that far apart in age, a year) when they were that age.

It was a trial. The 5 month old had never been on a long car trip like that. He cried about being in his car seat for long periods of time. We figure, he has family in Arizona, he's going to get used to road trips! The 16 month old was good as gold. She liked getting down to run, but with the oppressive heat of the deserts in Southern California and Arizona, on the way to Phoenix, there wasn't much of that. So when she got to my parents' home, she explored and ran. She's still happy.

There are two purposes to this trip: introducing the babies to long-distance car trips, and introducing them to their great-grandparents.


Donna