Snacks.

There are two notable things about today’s drive home and they are both food-related, which anyone who has road-tripped with a kid will understand. It’s all about the snacks. In our case, we actually only made one stop (well, two, but one right after the other, just up the road) and that’s where all the action was.

Within the first hour, The Who was knocked out. Neither of us slept very well last night and I’m not sure if it was the anxiety of having to say goodbye or the humidity in the room or our allergies (maybe a combination of all three) but compared to all the nights in our house on the Cape, where I laid my head down and didn’t remember a thing until I was woken up in the morning, last night was sort of restless. And I know I heard The Who rustling around a lot, too. So, yeah. Not great sleep + droning highway driving = sleeping Who.

So, as he napped, I plotted. I remembered having seen the PEZ Visitor’s Center advertised on 95 on our way up last week, so I did a quick google, got the address, and pointed my gps directly at it. This gave The Who an hour and a half to sleep and when he woke up, I got to tell him that we were at a candy store. Win-win!

I want to have one of these PEZ benches in my house. Although, I think, first I need the kind of house in which a PEZ bench wouldn’t look crazy.

Wall of PEZ.

It was a little chaotic in there with all the kids and The Who so excited that he was like a pinball in a machine, so I didn’t get to really read all the history on the walls. But I did catch this. Did you know this?

This is a bunch of candy set in a window in the floor. There were a few of these in the room with different things in them. One was all different dispensers. One was PEZ candy packages.

Somehow I didn’t get a picture of the bank of PEZ tablets in bulk, with which you could fill a small bucket for $5. You’d be surprised how many PEZ fit in a small $5 bucket. (HINT: A LOT.) Immediately after that, you could choose a decorate-your-own dispenser. The Who chose a tractor-trailer to decorate. (Surprised? I wasn’t.)

He used his mad pattern-making skillz to fill it up.

And then he just gazed lovingly at it for a while.

And then there was lunch. I contemplated driving around and looking for an actual restaurant, but that would have taken too much time, so I hopped back on 95, expecting to just get off at some crappy rest stop and eat crappy rest stop food. Little did I know that the rest stops on 95 in Connecticut are awesome. Freals.

In a clean, well-lit building with super parking, sat this beacon of perfection. Freshly made, totally customizable, good-sized grilled cheese sandwiches. The Who was instantly sold.

The Who had a “classic” but I had this tomato/fresh basil gem. Road trip food is never good. But it was today.

And now we’re home.

The end.