We are on a family mission to complete a 5355km long road trip in just 17 days. Yesterday we picked up the rental car, a Toyota Sienna!

After we prepared the car with Emily her seat and necessary additions for entertainment, an iPad mount! And an powered cooler for cold drinks we started our first part of the road trip to Bradford just beyond the border from New York State and Pennsylvania.

We left at 3:30 and Emily slept in 15 minutes later for about 40 minutes, the drive went very smooth over the 407, a toll road. But as soon as we left the toll road we hit traffic on the Queen Elizabeth Way, not much we could do about it, but it was only a 15 minute delay.

From there we drove straight to the border to the United States of America. Here we encountered a longer delay, 10 minutes to learn that our last US entry stamps were to old and that we needed to go inside for a picture, finger prints and to pay 12 USD. Not a big problem if it wasn’t for the hour long wait…we all were annoyed and irritated while there is no system in place to see if it’s your turn already or not.

After a quick restroom stop we were in New York State, State #2 of the trip. Soon the TomTom app on our phones told us that the traffic around Buffalo was all gone and it should take us only 1:34 hours to get to our first hotel.

But not even 15 minutes into the USA Emily wanted to go to the restroom again, we literally drove in the middle of nowhere and the first restroom we found was a porta potty, normally not a big problem but this one wasn’t cleaned in this decade…we continued our search and only a couple 100 meter away we found a restaurant/bar/community centre/everything else a community of 20 houses needs.

After the quick stop and go we drove to our hotel without stopping, the hotel is in Bradford Pennsylvania which is the State #3!

Emily was happy that she could go to bed and at 8:30 it was all lights out. At 8:32 she asked if I could sleep with her in the big bed and so I head a challenging night of sleep and I’m awake at 5am, at least I got roughly 8 hours of sleep, Emily and Mama are both still dreaming softly!

Today we’ve got one of the longer drove ahead of us with 308 Miles towards Washington DC!