Jacob saves the day and then himself. Mommy loses the keys.

Welcome to the Bad Luck Rest Stop.

We just stopped at a Travel Plaza outside of Elkhart, IN and it was quite the adventure. After going in and having everyone take a potty break we filled up the car with gas. It was time to get back in the car but when I said that to the kids they looked at me with pleading in their eyes and a "oh no...not the car again" cry from Hannah. We decided to drive around behind the travel plaza and let the kids ride their bikes for awhile. Once we got the kids on the bikes and their helmets on I decided to call Rachel and give her an update on our progress. That is when the fun began.

Rachel picked up the phone just in time to hear me scream "SHIT!" I had just shut the driver's side door with the keys still on the seat. I must have hit the auto lock when I was getting stuff out of the car and I had managed to lock our keys in the car. Luckily Lincoln pointed out that the tailgate was open from when we were getting the helmets out of the back of the car. Jake was the only one small enough to climb over all the stuff in the back of the car but he managed to sneak his way in. Unfortunately he doesn't know how to unlock the door because it always unlocks automatically when the car is put into park (geez....kids these days don't do anything for themselves!) so it was pretty comical with Lincoln and me trying to yell through the closed windows to explain how to open the locks.

After that fiasco was over I was standing in the open passenger side door looking at the road atlas on the front seat and telling Rachel what route we were planning on taking around Chicago in order to avoid rush hour traffic. I looked up to see Jake laying on the ground underneath his bike after an apparent spill. He was about 75 feet in front of the car and I went running to him trying to keep my flip flops from flying off (or worse yet tripping me and making me fall too) as I raced over to him. Poor Rachel got to hear me yell "Oh God! I'm coming Jakey!" before my phone dropped out since I had my bluetooth headset on and had raced away from my phone which was still in the back of the car. Before I even got to Jake he had pulled himself out from under his bike, patted himself on the head and said "I had my helmet on!" He managed not to scrap his knees and elbows so everything was a-okay and he was back on his bike in no time.

Once crisis number two had passed Rachel and I wrapped up our second phone conversation with her probably wondering what the hell she had gotten herself into inviting us to come visit them this weekend. We loaded up the kids and put the bikes back onto the car and then it was time to hit the road.....just in time to discover crisis number three.

Lincoln went to empty the trash bin from the back seat and Jake asked me if he could roll down his window. I said I couldn't start the car because Daddy had the keys. When Link came back to the car Jake asked him to turn the car on and Link said he couldn't because Mommy had the keys. Uh oh. Not good. We ripped the car apart looking for the keys. We looked under the seats....and under the car itself.....in the cooler, in the laundry basket, next to and underneath both car seats, and every where else we could possibly look. In situations like this you know that the keys are always going to turn up in the most random spot possible and of course they did this time. The atlas was up on the dashboard and I had slid it from side to side making sure the keys weren't on the dashboard but it wasn't until I picked the atlas up and one of the keys was dangling out of it that we discovered where the keys were.

Once we left the Bad Luck Rest Stop we thought our troubles would be over but instead we ended up in dead stop on the interstate. We haven't yet figured out what the problem is but for a full five minutes we didn't move at all. Now we're crawling along at 5 miles an hour. At this rate we'll get to Madison around the time we need to leave for Decorah on Sunday.