Travel Tips.

Our [sandy] nomadic days have come to an end. We've eaten and road-tripped our way up the Eastern seaboard and here is a smattering of the things I've learned:

-Outdoor showers (while totally amazing-feeling) never quite get one fully clean.

-For that matter, no matter how many loads of laundry one does while staying at the beach, one will find a veritable desert of sand in her washing machine at home.

-Even though my mother purports to hate a fuss being made over her, she'll cry with happiness at each new surprise partygoer walking through the door (with a combination of joy and anger that I'm going to go ahead and term "janger." Example: "This is ridiculous. You did not have to travel all this way to see me," she exclaimed jangrily.)

The birthday girl with her favorite daughter.
Also, an epic photobomb by Rachel.

-The new Trivial Pursuit Bet You Know It game is incredibly fun but- like any other game which requires placing bets against other players' knowledge- is incredibly detrimental to a marriage. (One of us may have thrown a wedding band against a couch.)

-Susannah does not want to leave the water, whether the ocean is in Massachusetts or Maine. So don't even try that junk anymore.

-Nora has eaten all of the chocolate munchkins on the East Coast.

-My Dad has purchased for Nora all of the chocolate munchkins on the East Coast.

You missed a crumb there, kid.

-Lobster should be Maine's chief export. (Is it?) Or maybe it used to be, before I ate it all.

-Watching Olympic gymnastics makes me feel a) patriotic, and b) like maybe I could have actually participated in Olympic gymnastics.

-If, for example, one nannied for a family for nine years, extreme shock will occur upon the realization that the eldest is almost as tall as the nanny and the youngest is quite good at walking around with the nanny's baby.

If they're this grown up, that makes me...close to nineteen years old. 

-Vacations with one's children are not as restful as traveling without one's children (but a thousand and two times more restful than traveling with someone else's children).

-And finally: if the traveler has the childlike sensibilities of sheltered ferret, it will take roughly one week for the traveler to not bolt upright at every little sound on their godforsaken street at 3am, wondering whose bed/cat/baby is in the room, and inform her husband that ocean sounds "a little weird."

However, if the traveler's husband is anything like mine, he is no longer surprised by anything the traveler says or does, nor is he alarmed by the possibility of a weird ocean.

Which makes him a key element in future travel plans.

"Weird ocean? Sure thing, honey. I'll take care of it."