Women who have a baby soon forget how brutally difficult child birth can be, as a result of which they're willing to get pregnant and have another baby or two. Similarly, when you take a vacation with infants and toddlers, you forget how terrible it is to travel in a car with them. By the next year, you're ready for another vacation and another car trip.
I think it's some form of selective amnesia.
Last Saturday, Jude, J.P., Joey and I traveled home from Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, in Jude's Honda Pilot. Aside from the trip home from the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, 15 years ago or so - when I traveled with 3 horribly broken fingers on a charter plane that was 12 hours late - our trip back to Nashville was the worst travel experience of my life. And I'm not even exaggerating.
What should have been a 6 1/2 hour trip home took 10 1/2 hours. I clocked it. And I felt like crying.
Within an hour of departing Santa Rosa Beach and winding our way toward Montgomery, Alabama, on a series of 2-lane highways, J.P. was whining and crying, literally crying, about the trip home taking too long. Then, he began vomiting. Again and again and again.
At one point, with Jude sitting in the back seat between J.P. and Joey, I passed a tupperware container back to J.P., so he could vomit in it. I hear his window roll down then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the container sailing down the highway. J.P. started screaming and asked me to turn around and drive back to get it. I refused. More crying. Finally, he explained he was trying to "dry" the container, which apparently had a few drops of water in it, when he rolled down the window. Makes sense, right?
We stopped in some tiny, tiny town on the Florida-Alabama border to look for a store that would give us a cup of hot water to warm Joey's bottle of breast milk. No luck. We ended up parking at the City Hall/Public Library building, which was closed. While I sat in a rocking chair on the front porch and gave Joey his bottle - in 95 degree weather - Jude and J.P. walked up the road in search of a bathroom.
From there, J.P. cried all the way to Montgomery, where we stopped in a Chick-fil-A. For the play area, of course. I fed Joey (or tried to, as he wasn't hungry), ate part of a disgusting chicken salad sandwich and watched J.P. in the play area. After almost an hour, I suggested to J.P. that he go to the bathroom, so we could leave. In response to what seemed like a perfectly reasonable request from me, he threw a fit and began yelling, at the top of his lungs, "I want to go the McDonald's play area." In Chick-fil-A, with customers and employees staring at us.
Back in the car, whenever J.P. calmed down momentarily, Joey started crying inconsolably. Jude tried to comfort him while she ducked down and used the breast pump. It got so bad, at my suggestion Jude removed Joey from his car seat and held him as we drove, state and federal laws on securing infants in car seats be damned. At that point, I would have let Joey drive if it would have made him stop crying. No sooner did Joey calm down, then J.P. started crying again. It was "hell in a Honda." I plugged my ear buds back into my iPhone and listened to another podcast.
In Huntsville, 1 1/2 hours away from Nashville, J.P. insisted we stop at another Chick-fil-A. Play area time again. At this point, I was catatonic. I had the "thousand yard travel stare." Finally, we left Huntsville and drove up I-65, headed home. Suddenly, J.P. began vomiting again, mostly dry heaves because there was nothing left for him to throw up. Lovely.
I've never, ever been so glad to arrive home from a trip. Next year we're flying. Or not going.
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