Fun Family Adventures: The Road Trip

I’ve been looking at pictures of family road trips all summer long.

Social media has been permeated with information related to these long trips: family selfies in the car, updates on mileage driven, moments captured of stops along the way, and pictures of the strange ways kids sprawl out in order to make themselves comfortable in the car.  Other common shots are the mid-way picture of a kid sleeping soundly, and the dazed look due to hours upon hours of screen time. Even though their eye balls are barely connected, they seem utterly content.

And I’m keenly aware of how the parents often look in these photos.  Often they look….good.  Like they’ve had showers, like they’ve got it together and are actually having fun, like they are sanely enjoying the road trip with the family in tow.  Many of their trip updates also communicate excitement and happiness with things like exclamation points!  and smiley faces 🙂  And even a thumbs up: 

And this, my friends, all of this, I do not understand.  I have never enjoyed road trips; I’ve even turned down a vacation due to the drive it required. I’ve been incredibly grateful for generous family members over the years who have contributed toward some plane tickets for our yearly family vacation to Florida. This is an eighteen hour drive I have preferred to avoid.

But this year was a little different. We flew to Florida without a problem. All of us made it-  three children, two parents, five pieces of luggage, and one dog – without a hitch.  And two weeks later, it was time to return.

My husband and I have two different internal clocks.  When he has to be somewhere, his internal alarm goes off with enough time to arrive anywhere at least fifteen minutes early.  When I have to be somewhere, my internal alarm, um, doesn’t go off.   I always get there….it’s just not fifteen minutes early.  Good grief.

So our regular pre-airport conversation is usually very similar to the one we had the night before our flight was scheduled to return home:

The husband:  Our flight leaves at 5:30; we have a two and a half hour drive to the airport, and we have to return the rental car…

Me:  So, we’ll leave at 1:30.  

The husband:  I’d say more like 1:15

Me:  Or 1:30

The husband:  Actually, in case there’s traffic, we should leave at 1:00.  Maybe even 12:30.  

Me:  Or 1:30.  

We left at 1:30.

And…we missed our flight.

I was in utter denial as the minutes ticked by while we sat in a dead stop on the highway.  I kept praying that God would just move us forward out of the mess so we wouldn’t miss this flight.  As if my pleading prayer was somehow magical, I kept thrusting forward while saying out loud:  “We’re going to get there!  We’re going to move forward!  We can still make it!”  The kids complained about being hungry, needing to use the bathroom, not having enough power on their devices….and we had been in the car for ONE HOUR LONG.  And so, all I could think about was what seventeen additional hours would to my children….to our dog….to my sanity.

We missed the flight by an hour and ended up in a hotel next to the airport.  Thankfully, we were able to move our tickets to the next morning for an early flight out of Tampa, and by the time we got to the hotel, I was particular grateful for planes and for the fact that we survived three hours in the car together:  three children, two parents, five pieces of luggage, and a dog.

That night I set my alarm clock for the exact time my husband suggested.

The next morning was a whirlwind. After an hour check-in line, a twenty minute attempt to get our pup into the carry on bag, and forty minutes through security, we finally made it to the gate.  All of us made it to the gate: three children, two parents, five pieces of luggage, and one pup.

And then they canceled the flight.

Again, denial:  We’ll just get another flight, another hotel room, and we’ll fly out in the morning just fine. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll fly out in the morning.  

“We can definitely get you on a flight sometime next week,” were the words that brought me back to reality.  So, I slowly and defiantly trudged over to the rental car line. And the closer I got to the rental car desk, the more I felt my emotions stir.  The lady in front of me clearly noticed my frazzled look and offered to share the drive to St. Louis in an SUV they had just rented. I merely pointed in the direction of my: husband, three children, five bags of luggage, and one dog.

And then the lady laughed. She laughed.  How in all of the earth was any of this funny?  Through her giggles she replied, “Maybe you better get your own car.  Hopefully you can get a big one.”

I waved good-bye to the laughing lady just in time to hear the rental car employee speak to the gentleman right in front of me in line:  “Well, sir.  Looks like you got our last SUV.” 

For the love of road trips.  I knew right then and there I was going to die.

I begged him to check and double check again that they didn’t have a bigger car because, as I explained, my kids can’t touch each other.  With that explanation, I assumed he would show some empathy and pull out their secret larger car for families like us – whose kids can’t touch each other.

Through tears, and while my daughter circled me with with the dog leash until it was wrapped around my legs, I stood there and considered.  I just thought about the potential road trip. The gentleman interrupted my comatose state suggesting that maybe I just try the car to see if it could work.

I took the keys, apologized for…myself, and promptly fell over due to the leash and the dog.

This, my friends, was the start of our 2016 road trip from Florida to St. Louis.

We were squished in the car, but we all fit: three fussy children, two weary parents, five pieces of luggage, and one hyper and confused dog.

And I immediately started thinking about my sister, Erin. My sister does road trips with her three kids ALL THE TIME. She doesn’t look frazzled after them, and she actually enjoys them.  I have heard her even call them “fun family adventures.”  I was racking my brain trying to remember all the reasons she actually likes being cooped up in a car for hours on end: They are fun family times, they are a great time to listen to a book on tape, they are the perfect time for the kids to just enjoy their devices, and… blah, blah, blah.

None if it resonated with me. None of it. These were the phrases my husband and I heard come out of our offspring’s mouth within the first one hour of our eighteen hour road trip:

You are totally on my side!  Get over!  

She keeps touching the side of my leg and it’s disgusting!  

You are the most annoying ever.  Ever.  

Why do you have to be like that?  And you just smell.  

Her popcorn is all over my side of the floor.  

This was a fun family adventure NOT AT ALL.  It wasn’t at all, my dear sister, Erin.

This is what it was:

It was my eldest with her head between her legs and her hands over her ears.  It was my son annoyed that his little sister was touching the side of his leg.  And it was my youngest frustrated at the prospect of  having to remain as narrow as possible so as to not touch her brother’s side leg or her sister’s floor.

A good hour after leaving a gas station, I panicked because I couldn’t find my phone. These kinds of moments tend to escalate very quickly.  They go from, “Does anyone see my phone?”  to “I’m sure my phone fell out of the car, so we’ve got to turn around and go back to look for it!  Everyone will have to get out of the car and search the ground at the gas station.  If we need flashlights, I’ll get flashlights!” in a very short amount of time.

My husband asked me more than once if I checked my bag. Of course I had checked my bag. A thousand times I checked my bag. The phone was not in my bag.

So we pulled over and everyone and everything got out of the car.  The five pieces of luggage, the popcorn, the water, the dog, the back packs, everything came out so we could make every effort to find the phone that I was sure was lost in the parking lot back at the gas station.

And then my eldest found my phone.  In my bag.

Whatever.

Because that was not enough fun, a few hours later I began feeling car sick, and dry-heaving quickly followed. Lest you think several minutes of dry-heaving might draw out some kind of sympathy from my family, exactly two words came from the back seat during my escapade:  gross, mom.

For the love of dry-heaving.

I thought of my sister. She gets car sick too. How does she still enjoy this so called fun family adventure if she gets car sick? She drives.  I remembered her saying that when she gets car sick, she drives.

I decided to drive, and I did what any person does when it’s late and they need to be alert and vigilant:  I bought a huge box of chocolate.  Surely stuffing my face with sugar would keep the drive as smooth as possible.

And this decision resulted in a 2:00 a.m. stop at a gas station. And not for gas. A large box of chocolate on an already car sick stomach did not mesh.

Because I couldn’t make it to the bathroom, my condition was heard by all.  And so my youngest, unable to contain her emotions any longer,  crawled out of the car yelling that she was going to throw up: “Your throwing up makes me throw up!“

Are these 2:00 a.m. stops part of my sister’s fun family adventures?  Did I just need a change of attitude?  Maybe I just needed ginger-ale and an attitude change. Perhaps all of these “thumbs up,” exclamation points and smiley faces are about having a different perspective on road trips: THEY ARE AN ADVENTURE, I needed to tell myself.

My attitude change lasted a good five minutes. I sat in the back with my son and my youngest daughter, and the first complaint was that my arm was touching my son’s IPad.  The second complaint was that my “throw-up ginger-ale” was touching my daughter.  If it kept touching her, she was going to throw up just like I did.

So super fun.

It was about this part of the drive that it hit me: my sister had driven through the night not that long ago and said it worked well because the kids slept. I have heard about these so called small beings that actually sleep in cars, but I have never been blessed with one.

It was 2:00 a.m., and everyone was still wide awake.  Why was my eight-year-old wide awake?  I pleaded with her to stop asking questions about why I threw up (why people throw up in general, whether I think she will throw up, and how many people go to the hospital because of this stomach reaction) and just look at her screen. I wanted to have the picture of a dazed but content child due to hours upon hours of screen time. I wanted dis-connected eyeballs.

Around 3:00 a.m., I explained as sanely as I could to my youngest daughter that there is an off switch somewhere inside of her. Sometimes you just have to find it, turn it off, and enjoy the quiet that it brings. She couldn’t find the switch, she explained. Around 4:00 a.m., my explanation turned into a very simple but pleading command: Go. To. Sleep.  

She squeezed her eyes shut declaring she was “trying to find that switch,” but never fell asleep. No one ever fell asleep.  Why and how in eighteen plus hours did no one ever fall sleep?

For the love of fun family adventures.

By the time we reached home, the sun was close to coming up. I couldn’t help but think about my sister and the way she consistently looks amazing before, during, and after these road trips.  Proof, my friends, from one of my sister’s fun family adventures, otherwise known as a road trip:

And this, this is me on a fun family whatever trip:

But we made it home. All of us: three children, two parents, five pieces of luggage, and one dog.  We made it home.

Cheers to all of you road trippers – especially those who actually choose this sort of travel.  Kudos to those who arrive looking like my sister, find ways around car sickness, don’t lose their phones in their own bags, can keep the fighting under control when one child is touching another child’s side leg, and who have the perspective to see these drives as fun family adventures.  

I think I’ll stick to a plane.