Justin, the boys and I just got back from a quick trip to Washington DC! Justin was up there for work, so after he was finished with the conference, the boys and I drove up to meet him.
It’s about a 4.5 hour drive from Raleigh, and I’ll admit I was a little nervous about doing that trip alone. We’ve done 5 hour road trips with the boys before, and the boys have always done so well in the car, but I’ve always had another driver.
We left in the morning, and I had easy access to snacks + toys in the passenger seat. We hit a bunch of rain on the way up, which slowed us down a little bit, but David and Luke did great. We made a pitstop just north of Richmond at a mall, but I failed to notice that it was an outdoor mall with no food court. I looked up a few different places to stop, and I think I just got confused about which mall this was. So, after unloading the boys from the car into the stroller in the rain, I pushed them into the mall hoping for a play place to let them burn some energy. We ended up in the Nordstrom nursing mothers room, eating a peanut butter and jelly that I had packed “in case of an emergency”. They got some wiggles out in there, and I tried my best to just make it work.
We got back in the car and finished the drive up to the Gaylord National Harbor, just south of DC.

We met up with Justin, dropped off stuff in the room, and then took the boys immediately outside to run around. The rain had subsided, so it was perfe...