It’s going to take me a while to decompress from the awesome that was our recent road-trip adventure. It’s also going to take me a while to unfurl and soothe my heart, which got so badly crumpled in the emotional turmoil of mixing tremendous joy (adventuring with my children and my dearest friends) with terrible pain (the death of my grandpa and the consequent family implosion.) But I will recover, and my heart will unfurl, and when this happens – soon, soon – I will try to sort it all out into words. (And I will, I promise, open comments again so that we can be all discursive and such without risk of me melting down into a pile of exhausted, dribbly mush, like I did – live and in-person! – with the Vancouver bloggers, who were gracious enough to just pat me on the back and let me have my silence. And my martini.)

(I am not good with discourse when I am tired or sad or otherwise brainfogged. And did you know that martinis become significantly less dry when you leak gobby tears into them? They stay salty, though.)

Anyhoo.

In the meantime, you’ll get a pretty good sense of the flavor of the trip by watching this:

Eighties and nineties hits on satellite radio, jamming preschoolers, a head-bopping driver, Redneck Aunty crammed into the back seat with her Flip video and me recording it all for posterity and yucks. Add a whole lot of Happy Meals and an insufficient supply of Gravol and that about sums it up.

For now.