At one time I hated to drive any long distance with our young children in the van. I would attack the journey, considering every vehicle I passed a personal conquest on the way to our destination. The problem was that I was the only one who took the conquest serious. My actual foes were the passengers in my own vehicle. One of our kids would say “I need a drink”, while another would say “I need to go pee” or even worse - the dreaded “number two”, and because four of our five kids are girls, the bush on the side of the road was usually NOT AN OPTION. The first 100 miles of a trip would take the same length of time as the last 250. One time I figured out that we actually had an average of one stop every ten miles.
Now our older kids (the first batch) have matured and grown, but the younger kids (9 & 11) are worse on my patience. They have learned the best ways to push my buttons from the older group and then came up with some of their own. Tricks like saying, “I think I am going to be sick” just moments before they threw up. The actual throwing up part only happened on occasion, it was a tactical move on their part (I am sure of it). The message was that they were serious and this could be the time that the whole back seat would be covered, if I didn’t take action. It happened often enough that I was not able to gamble with the results. I needed to take action NOW!!!
This battle took place for many years - until I discovered Geocaching. Now when they need to take a break I check the GPS for the nearest cache. I drop them off to get drinks, and let them have their potty break. Instead of watching all the vehicles drive by and of fuming about my position in the race, and complaining about excessive pit stops I get another caching experience in a foreign land. Geocaching maintains sanity.
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