2020 Hottest Vacation Destination: Tulsa (Part 1)

PART 1: The Preparation

When John first proposed the idea of relocating to Tulsa for 2 months for his job, I was drunk in an airport bar. He somehow made it seem like a great idea: exploring a new city, an extra week's worth of paid vacation, a daily stipend! I jollily agreed and the plans were immediately put into place. I barely had time to recover from my hangover before John was approved for the transfer and we were officially moving to OKLAHOMA for TWO MONTHS. White wine makes me do stupid things.

The actual logistics of this trip didn't start to dawn on me until the following days. I'd have to drive the two kids (ages 3 and 1!!) and our dog (huge & growly!!) about 15 hours from Colorado to Oklahoma with not much in between. When you're driving with small kids, you should factor in the extra time for diaper changes, meal stops, and exercise breaks- which adding all up can make a typical trip 2 or 3 times longer. So now I was looking at a 30-45 hour road trip! Also worth mentioning that this would be a SOLO trip, as John isn't allowed to have family members in his work vehicle and he'd be leaving several days ahead of us.

We've gone on quite a few long road trips with our kids. Many across Colorado, and a few back and forth to WI/MN. But it's always a team effort: one of us drives and handles the murder podcast situation, while the other (usually yours truly) is in charge of snacks, entertainment, picking up dropped items, getting water, calming the crying, fixing the tablet hundreds of times, getting more snacks, calming the screaming, and of course getting more snacks. This is a team effort because it is nearly impossible to control a large SUV as it hurtles down the highway at 78 MPH while one handedly trying to locate an obscure fucking Spiderman toy or finding where you put the GODDAMN FRUITSNACKS without taking your eyes off the road. And we can tap out if one of us gets sick of driving (rarely) or if one of us gets sick of being the wizardly butler to our asshole kids (always). By the end of each trip, John and I are equally drained and about to drive off a proverbial cliff.

The more I thought about the logistics, the more anxious I became and the more impossible it seemed. The only other option was flying, but it barely crossed my mind because of COVID, obviously, and because flying alone with two kids (one being a super-crazy-fast toddler and the other a mostly happy baby who sometimes has unpredictable screaming fits) equally scared the shit out of me.

I did half-heartedly try to wiggle my way out of going at all. I suggested to John that maybe he flies home for long weekends and we do a lot of facetime. He wasn't having it. So I delayed, and I complained, and I let my nerves build up. And I prepared. Like building some sort of toddler bug-out bag for the end of days, I prepared. I Amazon primed the fuck out of road trip necessities. I blew $300 at Walmart on snacks and little toys. I bought every single shitty toy and weird new snacks at Dollar General (actually a really great selection and after buying the entire store, I only spent like $23). I borrowed a tiny TV/DVD combo & a bunch of kid movies from my friend Jess on top of a fully Disney+ loaded tablet. It was looking good.

I don't have much experience with toddlers (shocking, I know), so I don't know if this is normal but when Jack's even slightly hungry or bored, he asks for a snack. I politely ask him what kind of snack he wants and he replies, equally politely, "Snack". We will go on a never ending loop of this with me demanding WHAT KIND OF SNACK and him angrily yelling SNAAACK. Maybe it's his clever way of mentally breaking me (it's working) or maybe this dummy really cannot articulate what he wants to eat. Either way, I thought I came up with some fool proof ways to satisfy him. And I was pretty cocky about it.

I loaded up on different types of snacks. The tricky part here, was that I couldn't get anything with too much sugar because I didn't want him to be strapped down in his car seat all jacked up out of his mind with energy. He is a fucking nut case after just 1 or 2 cookies, so as tempting as it was to throw gummy worms in his general direction for 15 hours, I bought mostly healthy snacks. I got different dried fruits, an assortment of nuts and weird veggie potato chips, different flavors of rice cakes, and olives, different variations of coconut shit, raisins, and just for fun- tiny little Oreos. In retrospect, and reading back on what I bought, it sounds like a very strict diet of someone with a borderline eating disorder. But at the time, I was patting myself on the back, lovingly creating little bento box (little plastic bead divider boxes from the craft section of Walmart) containers of an assortment of what I thought would be a well received selection of snacks.

I also had the bright idea of preparing emergency "grab bags". I got brown lunch bags and filled them with 5-6 sandwich bags of different snacks. These were less pretty than my bento boxes but I didn't even think I'd need them. I made about 15 (1 for every godforsaken hour) of these, along with 2 immaculate bento boxes. I thought the sheer variety of snacks would distract Jack for hours. Boy, was I fucking WRONG.

Maybe my first mistake was that I had all these shitty toys that I bought and I didn't know what to do with them. I thought that maybe I'd wrap them, to present them as gifts to Jack. I wrapped a couple in actual wrapping paper before I ran out of wrapping paper, so I wrapped the rest of them in the same brown lunch bags as my emergency "grab bags". I sloppily wrote on the outside TOY so I could tell them apart. But you know who couldn't tell them apart? Jack.

We were about 30 minutes into our 45 hour drive when Jack said "Snack?". I smugly passed him a bento box and he was a bit impressed, I could tell. Then we made eye contact in the rear view mirror and he tipped it upside down and emptied it out on the floor while softly whispering "Snack". Total power move-and I realized that although I was in the driver's seat- I was merely a passenger on a road trip from hell.