Are we there yet?

I am so ready to be not awake. After fifteen hours and thirty-nine minutes on the road, I could use some shut-eye.

We had to make it to Flagstaff tonight, because I made hotel reservations ahead of time (which required 24 hr notice to cancel or I'd get charged anyway). I made reservations because of too many experiences in the past of getting to a town and having to stop five times or even drive on to the next town before finding a place with rooms. In this case, the front desk lady tells me that they've been selling out every night lately and that tonight they were down to two rooms. But she said had I not had the reservations, I would have paid more (I guess the price goes up when supply is short).

Not too much eventful occured on the road thus far. The kids did lose their "fun packs" (backpacks with coloring books, books, toys, MP3 players, and DVD players) for a 175 mile segment due to a bit too much parental non-compliance at a rest stop.

I did have to stop for a power nap about 429 miles into the 872 miles we've traveled so far. I was delayed in my packing efforts last night, which put me a couple hours behind in sleep, which aslo put us a couple hours behind on departure time. Anyway, I was feeling very heavy-eyed, so I pulled into rest stop, had the girls listen to their music players, while I got exactly fifteen minutes of sleep. And it's amazing how far that went. Once I got up, I felt completely refreshed, and didn't have a single feeling of sleepiness the rest of the way. Now once we got to the room and I was able to relax, all that tiredness came rushing back, but those power naps (defined as an "intense" napping experience of less than 20-minutes) really do work.