754 miles. That’s the driving distance from Anderson, South Carolina to Brooklyn, New York. That’s the distance I need to cover if I want to visit my two older sisters, who for some mysterious reason cannot be convinced to relocate to my pleasant southern town. (It could be because they are sophisticated urbanites who dislike rural practices such as driving in cars and living in spaces larger than 800 square feet.)

It’s a distance much more easily traversed by airplane, but with three small children, “easy” is a relative term. The last time we flew to New York, two years ago, we were so distracted at LaGuardia while waiting for our return flight, so concerned with keeping the kids occupied and fed, that we missed our boarding announcement and the plane flew away without us. With all of our luggage. And they couldn’t book us on another flight until the next morning, so my sister came back to get us and Matt had to cancel all of his patients for the next day. He also had to walk to the CVS closest to my sister’s apartment and buy diapers for Ceci and underwear for me. And since everything in New York is smaller and narrower, including the aisles of CVS, the underwear was way up high and he was forced to ask an employee to get them down for him. The whole thing was humiliating. We vowed we would never make the same mistake again. So this year, when we decided it was time for another Brooklyn trip, we knew we would drive.

The long drive itself is nothing new; my parents still live in Upstate New York, and we make the trek up there at least twice a year. As I’ve said, the expense and stress of flying with the whole family just doesn’t feel worth it to us, especially after several nightmare experiences of getting delayed or stranded. (The first time we ever took Maggie on an airplane, she was four months old. We flew from Charlotte to Syracuse, circled the airport, which had shut down due to blizzard conditions, and then turned around and returned to Charlotte. Because apparently that made sense to someone. It was the five most pointless hours of my entire life, but at least it makes a good story.)

Over the years, though, our attitudes about how we should handle the drive have changed. For starters: with kids, it’s no longer a 13-hour trip. They don’t have the same bladder control their parents have. When we’ve been in the car too long, they sob and strain against their seat belts and scream, “Let me get out of here!”And when we do take a break to let them run around, the process of getting them back into the car truly makes us look like kidnappers. As a result, we’ve made the following adjustments to our driving routine:

1. We leave in the early evening and drive overnight. And when the children sleep, we put the pedal to the metal and do our best to shave minutes off the GPS estimated arrival time. Which reminds me of the time we got pulled over for speeding 15 miles into the 754 mile drive back…
2. We do dinner at Chick-fil-A. Always. Hooray for indoor playgrounds! Hooray for excellent service and seriously delicious fast food! They’re not even paying me for this plug; in fact, they probably wish we wouldn’t stop there for dinner every single time we make the drive. Our kids are wild and in pajamas and we spend a combined total of about 45 minutes in the bathroom.
3. We abandoned all our principles and bought a portable DVD player. Matt and I used to be proud of our old-school stance concerning technology in the car. We envisioned playing family games and singing songs and enjoying a good old-fashioned road trip. I guess we just didn’t understand the value of silence. We now understand the value of silence.

There’s no way around it- the trip from South Carolina to New York is grueling. In a lot of ways, it’s hard on all of us. There are people I know who don’t get why we put ourselves through it. “Just tell them you’re not coming,” they say. “Tell them you don’t want to do it.”

But as much as we dread the drive, as much as we complain about the exhaustion and the traffic and having to please the maniacs in the backseat, we do it because we want to. Because living 754 miles away from my family is hard enough, and I can’t imagine choosing not to see them. Because my daughters deserve to know their aunts, uncle and cousins. Because they benefit from spending time in a place so different from the one in which they live. Because of all the reasons to drive 1500 miles, family is the best possible one. 

This most recent trip had its stressful moments. There was the time when Alex, who just turned one, and Ceci, who is two, were both crying uncontrollably in their car seats, and Ceci yelled at Alex, “STOP COPYING ME!” There was the moment when Matt went to retrieve the car to load it up for the trip home and realized that it was… gone. As were all of the other cars on that particular block. Whoops. Family vacation fail.

And then there were these moments: My daughters’ faces, amazed, when they spotted the Statue of Liberty, lit-up outside their car windows, at 2:00 in the morning. My girls and their cousins marching down a Brooklyn street, arms linked, chanting nonsense words and giggling with their whole hearts. Riding a carousel beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Boarding a subway train, an experience as foreign to a kid from Anderson, South Carolina as stepping  outside your house without shoes on is to a kid from Brooklyn.

1500 miles is not so much, does not feel so impossible, when your destination is a place you really want to be, when the people you journey toward are the people you really want to be with. Eventually (with the help of Frozen and The Lego Movie) we might just learn to enjoy the ride, too.