Prep Work

As you all don't know, we're heading on a road trip in the near future in order to attend Miss Ellie's wedding. This will entail three days of driving to get there, as Miss Ellie is getting married in East Bumblyburg, and there are no airports within a thousand miles of there. Give or take.

Part of getting ready for a long road trip is to clean the vehicle in which you will travel. In this case, the winivan. Now, my childrens, darling as they are, seem to believe that the only difference between a floor and a garbage can is that you can also walk on a floor. Plus, a floor is generally a lot closer. When this philosophy is extended to winivans, well, it can get a bit sticky.

We removed all the "gear" that The Mrs. insists on hauling with her wherever she goes lest any kind of an opportunity present itself for which appropriate gear is not immediately at hand. What I refer to as "the mobile garage sale". The small junk got piled into a laundry basket.

This is problematic. We seem to regularly use laundry baskets to pile junk whenever we're cleaning something, and this cuts substantially down on the baskets available for actually doing laundry. We've had to cut back to just one load of laundry per week because of this problem. Though this morning MacieC put away the socks that were washed three weeks ago and had been left in a basket ever since, so perhaps we'll be able to do two loads a week now.

This laundry basket of junk was then placed in the hallway connecting the garage to the house so that I could trip over it about 6 times during the ensuing cleaning of the winivan.

I took out the seats (which, I must admit, I had only done once before in this van, and I had to check the manual to figure out where they hid away the latch release), and underneath was quite a bit of flotsam. Gooey flotsam. Perhaps what were once gummy bears, some nerds, a spoon from Cold Stone, and some fries with that.

The van got vacuumed, the carpet and mats got shampooed, everything on the inside cleaned, with the leather also getting conditioner applied. Then we washed and waxed the outside. I tried this new Turtle Wax "Ice" polish. It worked pretty well. I got the kind that you can use on paint, chrome, rubber, plastic, whatever, and it won't leave white residue. That definitely worked.

The whole process took about 6 hours. We even had to make a trip to Wal-Mart in the middle cuz we were out of car cleaning products. Now that the van is so fresh and clean, it's a shame to allow the fambly into it. Maybe I'll make them drive around in my pickup all week, and I'll take the van to and from work so that it stays clean.