The outing from hell

About two weeks ago my husband and I made plans to take the girls to the Lynn Meadows Discovery center.  The kids love going there to play and are always asking to go so needless to say when we told them we were going they were super excited. Well you know what they say about the best laid plans right?
Normally it takes us about 45 minutes to get to the discovery center so we decided to leave around 11:00. We thought we would drive over there, take the kids to lunch and then go to the center. We were driving down the interstate when we noticed traffic in our lane start to slow down. Then it stopped altogether. Awesome. We ended up sitting on the interstate for over 2 hours. That's right 2 hours. Guess how far we traveled in that time? Less than three miles. At this point the kids were all three in tears and I was pretty close to it myself. Finally we made it to an exit and duh, got the heck off the interstate. We stopped for lunch and decided that we would take the highway instead. We got in the car thinking we would soon be to our destination. Wrong again. What we failed to realize was that in the town we were in there was a huge shipyard nearby and their dayshift employees were just getting off work. Did I mention it was a huge shipyard? As in lots and lots of traffic? Combine all these people getting off work with all of the people getting off the interstate and you have a recipe for disaster. So we entered the second phase of hell. This time instead of sitting on the interstate  for two hours we sat on the highway for two hours. Needless to say by the time we got to our destination we realized that the center would only be open for an additional 30 minutes. Luckily we were able to talk the kids into going to the nearby beach instead.

Even better? There was a nice outlet center nearby so mommy got to go do a little bit of shopping before heading home.