Mexican McDonald's Mayhem

Last night, Himself had to work until 9 p.m.

We had to return Nephew to the very top of the state by 8:30 p.m. Which meant the duty of getting him there fell on me.

It was Grover's last night at our house. He and Himself catch a plane at 11-something tonight to head East.

I got home from work, piled all three kids in the car and we headed north. We zipped along for the first 20 miles and then ... well, one thing you should know about The Frontier is that there are only two seasons - winter and construction. We hit the awful, painful, traffic-slugging, lane-reducing, disasterous construction in the next county up.

Stop and go. And stop. And crawl. I haven't been in traffic that annyoing since I left DC. Mostly annoying because on the other side of the big orange barrels was a 2-lane-width stretch of smooth new asphalt that really should not have been sitting useless.

Of course, Grover and Woodstock had conked out the minute we left the driveway. Nephew, surely bored by NPR's Marketplace on the radio, had shoved his iPod in his ears and was looking mournfully out the window. We were off to a wild beginning.

In order for Grover to not have to endure his last night with us in the car, stuck in traffic for the 162-mile round-trip excursion with nothing else, I took them all out to dinner. Me. One teen. One pre-teen. One baby. You can only imagine the looks we got.

I decided on Mexican. Eeasy enough to satisfy everyone, right? Apparently not. Our final tally at the Mexican restaurant was Grover's "burrito" with just meat and cheese, Nephew's bacon cheeseburger, Woodstock's rice and my Chicken Mole (which I only ordered because I knew Himself would ask me how the Mexican restaurant was, and I didn't want to have to admit that no one, in fact, had ordered anything Mexican).

Add to that a 10-minute wait between our drink order and the next time we saw our waitress (who arrived sans drinks), the 15-minute wait for a table when there were five completely empty tables when we arrived, Woodstock's insistence on happily flinging rice all over - encouraged by Grover and Nephew's giggling, the fact that my food was nothing more than mediocre, and I was seriously thinking we should have done a drive-through run at a burger joint.

We made it to the northernmost McDonald's parking lot in the state, where we were meeting Nephew's dad, only 15 minutes late. As we were pulling in, Nephew said, "I don't really want to go home tonight." Grover said, "I don't really want to go home tomorrow." Woodstock clapped her hands in agreement.

The thought passed through my mind ... "Seriously? We've had the most convoluted, traffic-construction-mess, hot and sticky, mediocre food night of your entire stay and you don't want to LEAVE?!"

But I didn't say anything. Someday someone will say, "remember when?" and we'll all chatter about the happy adventure that involved not-very-Mexican food, road construction and a trip to the northernmost McDonald's parking lot in the state. Stranger things have happened.