Emma and I left early Tuesday morning on what we thought would be about a six-hour drive to Raleigh, NC, to see her brother Dave, his wife Lorrie, and their children Joseph and Sarah. We got on the interstate and set off north.

The drive was easy across southern Georgia and we hit Atlanta by about 11. While ordinarily we might have been very happy about this, except…well…Atlanta’s not really on the way to Raleigh. So, you see, what we should have done was head over to Jacksonville and gotten onto I-95, rather than just heading out on I-75. Whoops.

I knew in my head that we shouldn’t go through Atlanta to get to Raleigh, but didn’t say anything until we were actually in Atlanta. “So,” I said to Emma, “when do we turn east to Raleigh?”

“Umm…Turn east?”

“D’oh!”

We had just driven though downtown Atlanta, so we were able to jump on the Perimeter and head over to I-85, which would take us in approximately the right direction. As a small consolation, we drove by a Dave & Buster’s, where we decided to have lunch.

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The skee ball machines were down for maintenance, so we played a little pop-a-shot basketball and some other ticket games and won enough tickets to get a small, wind-up turtle, who we designated as our trip mascot. His name is “DB”, which one might guess stands for Dave and Buster’s, but that’s not the case. It’s Dingleberry. Dingleberry the turtle. He rode in the front of the car for the remainder of the trip, only falling off a very few times. Sharp turns, you know.

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We made it to Raleigh about 7 PM, which was not too bad, considering our misstart.

We had a really nice evening hanging out with Dave and the family. We had very good Indian take-out from a local restaurant in Raleigh. The children are pretty wild, but perhaps it’s their ages. Joe seems actually pretty appropriate for a five-year-old, but Sarah can be a handful. She’s apparently started playing this new game where she’ll do something that she knows is wrong then, when an adult comes to send her to time-out (”me time”), she’ll look at them and say, “Give me me time! I want me time!” Sigh.

Emma and I stayed up chatting with Dave and Lorrie for too late before finally going to bed, ready to start our second day of vacation.