Things I learned

This past weekend, we made our annual trip to Douglasville, Georgia to visit family for the holidays. After dropping Daisy, our lab mix, off at the "Doggie Hotel" and make a couple other necessary stops on Friday, we began our journey. Our 5 hour trip turned into much more with the help of bad traffic and a lot of sitting on the freeway. We finally made it around 6 and had just enough time to unpack our bags at the hotel before heading to our first event. The following day was another roll out of bed and go, go, go day. Which leads to my first lesson I learned this weekend.

1. When traveling, always leave room for yourself on your itinerary. In the past, I've always left things up to everyone else. As a result, I've ended each vacation feeling exhausted and in a ton of pain. This time, when I started to tire, we left a party early to take a much needed nap.

2. You can't please everyone. Because I said "no" in order to listen to my body, I felt guilty for not being able to do what each person wanted me to do. But I just couldn't do it all. When it feels like you can't please everyone, sometimes you just have to work to please yourself instead. In this case, it meant skipping an event in order to rest when I needed to.

3. Be spontaneous. As much as I love to plan out each and every minute, leaving room for spontaneity is also a must. I've been saying for years that I wanted to stop on the way home to see Christmas Lights. This year, we finally mad that stop. And you know what? We had a great time. Meghan got to see Santa. We sipped hot chocolate (well they did), roasted marshmallows and danced to the sound of bells in the "snow". It added on a couple extra hours to our trip, but the memories were well worth it.

4. I am not ready for a basic phone. Ok so this one is completely frivolous. We found ourselves nearing our data cap on our smartphones right before the trip. In an effort to avoid going over our cap, we turned data off on our phones. Suddenly not being able to check Facebook, look stuff up, or even use Google Maps about drove me crazy. I did break the black out a couple times, mostly to get coupons for Michaels, (Hey it was 50% off of one item!!!), but that was it.

5. After you get home, take a day to just be. Aside from getting Daisy and going to the store (because Daisy ate a 2nd jar of peanut butter right before the trip), we took today to just rest and relax at home. This meant that Meghan played, Robert played a video game, and I slept. If we had done anything else, I'd be in a world of hurt.

Oh, and road music is a must! Throw in some comedy albums too, laughing is great for a road trip!

There you have it, things I learned this weekend.