For those of you who do follow my tweet feed (@DadEnoughBlog), I mentioned – briefly – about how I need a vacation from our vacation.  Indeed, we went down to Busch Gardens Williamsburg again this weekend, and I’ll write about that in the coming days when I have some… distance.  (It was that kind of a Sunday.)

On the other hand, this was the first road trip in the wife’s new minivan.

Both of us, as I mentioned recently, had to get new cars – me because mine committed ritual suicide on the side of a highway, and the wife’s because it was slowly wasting away.  Her new car is a minivan, picked specifically for a few reasons:

• She has the kids and a need to carry cargo more often than I do.  My car mostly goes between home and the office, with an occasional longer jaunt.
• We tend to take her car on trips as it is anyway.
• Neither car could handle taking adults with us if we had the kids.

So despite pushing really hard against it for a while, she’d already come to the conclusion that a van made the most sense, and so we got one after she’d done some shopping and comparison online.

Best. Decision. EVAR.

The minivan eliminated most of our major problems with taking long car rides, especially with a child (*cough*TheMonster*cough*) who can’t be depended on to entertain himself for the entire trip.

The fact that he might well be screaming, obviously, can’t be helped… but now if he’s kicking and flailing in his carseat, his seat can be set far enough behind the driver so he can’t kick whomever is behind the wheel.  There’s an electrical outlet behind the center console to allow recharging of his iPad with a normal plug.  Plus… there’s the video screen.  Now when he’s whining about wanting Sesame Street – because the iPad doesn’t have data service – we can now give it to him so that he’s placated for a bit.  He’s even already figured out to keep the headphones on so he can listen to the video.

Definitely a massive improvement, all around.  Why didn’t we get one sooner?