Sleeping in the camper... Ez can sleep anywhere!

With the black ribbon of interstate I-95 melting away beneath us and the colors of the changing trees muted by the low cloud ceiling of the approaching storm, we are making our way south.

No one slept that well last night.

“I’m so excited, I’m fairly BOUNCING, Mom!” Hannah bubbled around her toothbrush as she cleaned her teeth before bed.  “I don’t know why, I guess just knowing where we’re going and how AMAZING it’s going to be.”

That sentiment is echoed throughout the troops.

The excitement has been tempered, somewhat for Daddy and I as we’ve slogged through the massive pile of “to dos” on the prelaunch checklists.

As always, things come together, almost magically, in the last days before we leap off of the cliff into another bottomless abyss of unknowns.

• Airline tickets
• housing
• transportation
• health care
• educational needs
• work
• gear

The million and one little details pertaining to each align themselves like electrons, orbiting the nucleus of our family in perfect order, as if they’d always been there.

Perhaps they have and we just can’t see them until we do the work to reveal their presence.  I’m not sure how it all comes together, it just does.

We awoke groggy this morning, having spent a final restless night tossing and turning through the minutia.  Having picked up some evil plague from our friends in NH last weekend, I awoke with no voice whatsoever.  This ensured the quietest launch on record.  The children all whispered to one another and back to me.  Funny how that happens.

The camper is tarped.  The wood and chairs are stacked beneath it.

Hannah stood for the better part of an hour holding the emergency cut off switch on the space heater so that it would keep running and melt the layer of ice in the freezer.  I forgot to defrost it yesterday.

The boys picked over every inch of our site for detritus left from the summer’s adventures.

Daddy patiently swept and caulked the roof, answered a million questions and tried to hear my voice over the din of elves in launch sequence.  It was a good morning, if not a quick one.

Van Kids: Self Portrait

We’re now stuck in traffic headed into Hartford, CT.  We’ll likely crawl all the way through NYC this afternoon.

Ahead of us is a weekend that will pass too quickly with one of our very favorite families in the world.  People we met entirely by accident when we cycled into their yard in the Czech Republic a few summers ago, now, chosen family; one of the best serendipities of our lives.

I spent the first hour of the trip sleeping off the last week and awoke to children busily studying in the back seats.  We stopped for an hour for a conference call with a prospective client (this is our life, not a vacation!) The van is running great.  The man has his music cranked up and is in the driving zone.

So begins the winter edventure for 2010, another successful launch!