Family Trip: Day 6

We logged 3 cities and 237.9 kilometres for this essentially-final day of the trip. The itinerary was simple...go to Toronto. But first...a stop at the Huntsville Wal-Mart where dad fulfilles yet another wish in buying new jeans for me...yeah, that's weird. Anyway, we left Huntsville at around 11 and headed in the direction of Toronto. Made a stop in Barrie for lunch and looking at Lake Simcoe. I should note that as I'm driving towards Barrie, I find myself in more and more traffic, eventually the highway widened to 3 lanes with even more traffic, and I started to get this strange anxiety and depression inside of me. When I got to Barrie, that feeling deepened even more as I hit downtown traffic and circling around and around to find parking. I almost snapped and wanted to quit driving at that point, actually, which is quite a contrast with the enjoyable driving that I've done throughout the trip. Looks like I'm more of a countryside person than an urban person... Anyway, back to the trip, we arrived at our hotel, and got some rest while dad went off for business. Went to T&T later on, then Mongolian Grill for a full meal, followed by bubble tea with Andrew and Peter, which was the best experience for the day...heh. The evening was spent with a lot of flowing data, and I slept at around 1am...

Random notes...

• I saw and touched a two-month-old baby at dinner...boy, that was a really touching moment. The skin is so tender. But whenever I see babies, I start to imagine what they have to go through in order to grow up and the kind of world that they are going to face, and that sort of gives me a heartache...
• About Huntsville...we stayed for 3 nights here, but we didn't do much in this town. It's sort of a middle-of-everything kind of town, and we used it as this focal point in the journey, branching out to surrounding areas each day. It's a surprisingly large city, though, with about 30K people (actually, I would say that any city that has a Wal-Mart is a large city...). Surprising for a town that doesn't seem to have any major industry going for it, except for the tourist industry surrounding the town...
• Part of what made this trip a bit straining for me is the fact that I planned this trip, and if they don't enjoy it, I feel quite responsible for that... It ended up well, thank God, but there were many moments where I felt that the trip was about to break down and become disappointing. Negativity at work, once again.
• Things I don't like: heavy highway traffic, downtown traffic with one-way streets, paying for parking.
• During the trip, at the end of each day, I would play this guess-the-kilometres game, where members of my family got to estimate the distance travelled on that day. It was a fun little game, and mostly my mom and dad won...sometimes with really close estimates.

I'm grateful to God for...

• such a wonderful trip, taking care of us every step of the way;
• the good times in meeting with Peter and Andrew;
• calming me down numerous times today when I start to become impatient, whether it's with the traffic or with the family;
• the unique things that I could only experience because I'm in this particular family; and
• being in control of everything, large and small, visible and invisible.