Last weekend we made a very impromptu trip to Denver. PS's robotics team had a competition there, but PS's grades have been super crappy and we did not pay the fee for her to travel with her team. We told her she was on probation and if she managed to pull her grades up, then she and her dad could fly in to see the competition. That way she would miss only one day of school instead of three. And to a teenager it is actually punishment to miss out on a 15 hour bus ride with friends.
I kept my fingers crossed that she would pull it out, but her grades remained crappy, and it became increasingly clear that flying in wasn't going to happen, either. So PS was mad at me for being the mean mom, and DH was mad at me because he has been a mentor to the team this season and he really wanted to go. (I convinced him that he could not go without her. It would crush her for her dad to go hang with her friends when she couldn't. We were trying to punish her, not destroy her soul.) I am big on following through with punishments, and I wasn't backing down while her grades were in the toilet.
A week before the competition, her grades were still crap. And then they suddenly started rising. Teachers entered old grades they had been sitting on. She got the highest grade on an Algebra test ever. The grades weren't good, but they were significantly better than they were a month prior.
And so DH and I decided late Wednesday afternoon that we would make the trek to Denver on Thursday. Flights were too expensive by then, and DH didn't want to make the drive alone. So we would all go, but we wouldn't pull the kids out of school on Thursday, so we couldn't leave until 4. And competition started at 9:00 on Friday--meaning a very long drive in a very short window.
We faced nearly every possible weather event along the way. Our car was pounded with hail on the way out of town (if you have never been in a hail storm in a car, it is terrifying--and our car wasn't even damaged), and missed a tornado by minutes. We saw the clouds start to swirl and spotters standing along the highway and less than five minutes later the radio confirmed an on-the-ground tornado in the exact location we had just passed.
Fortunately we were moving away from those storms, but into wind storms. It was work to keep the car on the road, and tumbleweeds were zipping across the road faster than I have ever seen. There was no avoiding them, and they are still embedded in my grill. And then the dirt fog. It looked like fog, but it was brown. Not kidding.
We dropped the twins off with relatives in Hometown along the way (they were happy to avoid rest of the drive and the competition) and continued our trek. By then it was midnight and we are traveling on pitch black, two lane rural roads.
And once we crossed into the mountains there was snow and ice on the ground. We left home at a balmy 84 degrees and arrived to 17 degree temps. It had not occurred to me that snow was a possibility, and we looked a little silly in our shorts and flip-flops when we arrived at our hotel at 5:00 am--just in time to get a couple hours sleep.
It was an exhausting weekend, but we were so glad that we let PS go. Robotics is the activity she cares the most about, and where all her friends are (she is an emotional robot, and she actually cried when we told her she could go). Her team did great, and we're glad that she (and we) got to see it. They won the competition and get to compete at the world championships again in a couple of weeks.St. Louis, here we come. But DH and I have already booked our flights this time around. (Although I am slightly terrified to put PS on a bus after that horrific accident in California.)
