Thursday, August 29, 2013

Another Walking Adventure that Doesn't Go Quite as Planned

Oh the best laid plans... or the worst made plans... okay, let's be honest... if I had planned for ten minutes instead of suddenly deciding at two o'clock this afternoon that we had to get out of the house, today would have probably gone differently.  But I was feeling impulsive and my tendency to underestimate distances and overestimate my body's ability to push a huge stroller those same distances struck again today and all I can say is hey... at least we had water.

This mid-afternoon impulsiveness hit a couple of hours after we'd finished the school work for the week and I surveyed the huge pile of books and toys in the school room and wondered how much worse it would be if we didn't get outside at all today.  I looked in the backyard and there was hardly a shadow to be found.  I declared it to hot to go outside.

And then the next thing I knew I was pushing a huge stroller towards the main street in our part of town with Sadie walking along beside me.  "It's not far," I said.  "Let's go see Daddy!"  

It seemed like a great idea.  When Paul left today I reminded him to bring his phone with him.  And he'd be getting out of class in fifteen minutes, so he'd be in the middle of a three hour break when we got there.  It would be perfect.

Now that we're home and I've consulted Google Map, I now know that we didn't take the most direct route.  Or the second most direct route.  Or the third most direct route.  In fact, I had to drag the little map path thing to the roads we took to find out that it was 3. 2 miles each way.  Which might not have been too far for me when I was walking every day back in Naples, but which was most definitely not the best distant for starting up walking today.  

Here we are about two and a half miles in:

Brave little troopers that they are... 
I called Paul and texted him the picture you see above and smiled to myself about how happy and surprised he would be to see us.  We were still about a half hour away, but we had yet to realize that Daddy didn't have his phone with him, or that his phone was on silent.  We were still blissfully optimistic as we navigated our ways through the crowds of students (Maggie won the award for getting the most people to say hi to her) to the law school.  Then we sent Daddy this picture from outside.  At this point, since he hadn't called back, we (I) had a sort of sinking feeling:


We sat outside for ten minutes and called him again and then walked slowly in front of the libraries huge windows, hoping he would see us.  Sadie jumped up and down and waved from the side

Alas, he did not.

And some people weren't thrilled to hear that Daddy wouldn't be coming out to see them (oh and later there would be a fight over that particular pink sippie cup):


So we began the long, slow walk home.  We did get to stop to see the marching band play a song, which was pretty awesome.  All three of the kids were very, very impressed:


About a mile away from home Sadie realized that she could sit on the stroller at Patrick's feet and transform our double stroller into a triple stroller.

In somewhat related news, after pushing that thing for a grand total of 6.4 miles, I may not be able to walk tomorrow.

I can't help but wonder how long it will be before I next under estimate a distance and decide we can walk somewhere really fun, when we really can't (or can but shouldn't).

And we've learned an important lesson.  Next time we decide to visit Daddy at school we'll make sure we've warned him that we're coming first so he can make sure to have his phone with him.

1 comment:

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