It’s almost summer, and summer means travel. Actually, to some people it might mean vacation, sunshine, trips to California or Florida, and partying on the beach, dancing around bonfires and drinking beer out of kegs. But, back to me.
Every summer I drive over a thousand miles with my kids to visit my parents. Every summer I think, “I must be nuts. Those old people should come see us! And why does my husband get to stay home in the nice quiet house?” This usually happens around the 15th hour of driving. By then, it’s too late to turn around, so we press on, snarling and bickering all the while.
On these trips, I learn plenty of things I wish I’d known before, like the fact that a car that seats eight shouldn’t really be filled with one adult and seven children. Unfortunately, I never get to use the things I learn, because the kids keep coming up with new “challenges”. My only hope is that someone with younger kids will read these tips and benefit from my astute observations.
Tips for travel with babies:
If you have a baby in a carseat, and you’re afraid that if you take that baby out of the carseat, you’ll never get her back in, because she’s just a teeny bit fidgety after 8 hours strapped in, you should:
1. Leave her in the carseat all day. The disposable diaper probably won’t explode, and a thick coating of diaper cream will keep her tender bottom protected. Besides, if the diaper does explode, you have the opportunity to see what makes the darn things so absorbent. Haven’t you always wondered? Never mind her increasingly loud protests about her imprisonment. Just turn up the radio.
2. Let her crawl or toddle around at each rest stop until she’s exhausted. Once you’ve cleaned off all the rest stop dirt and grime, cigarette butts, dead bugs, etc, she’ll be sound asleep. This plan may cause your trip to last nine days instead of twelve hours, but the baby will be quite fit by then from all the exercise.
3. Drive at night, you idiot. She’ll sleep instead of drinking from her ‘Da Vinci Code’ sippy cup, so she won’t produce quarts of baby urine, and you won’t have to test the limits of modern diaper technology.
Tips for travel with toddlers:
It’s extremely important to realize that they are not old enough to articulate “carsick”. If your three-year-old starts to turn a funny color, make hooting noises, or spew like Etna, you should:
1. Pull over immediately, even though you’re in the middle of the desert, and yank her out of the car so she can vomit on the side of the road, drenching several scorpions and a rattlesnake;
2. Drive with that really bad “used food” smell and a host of complaints from the other people in the car until you find a gas station or rest area, and plan on an extremely long stop, during which you will find yourself dismantling and cleaning a car seat in a tiny restroom sink;
Hand the person nearest to her a very large cup and instruct them to catch what they can. (Say it with me, now: EEEEEW!)
Tips for traveling with preschoolers:
What should you bring?
1. Crayons. They’re entertaining and tasty, too. Inevitably, one will be dropped (no one will mention this to you) and it will melt in the hot sun during one of your millions of potty stops and become a permanent part of the upholstery. This may sound bad, but it… Well, it’s bad. No crayons.
2. Grapes. They’re easy to eat: nothing to peel, no pits to spit at your siblings, no sticky juice running down the chin. And, at the end of the trip, when you clean out the car and find raisins, you can explain the miracle of dehydration to the kids. It’s Science! As a bonus, if you have really big grapes, you may get to practice the Heimlich Maneuver! Oh, that’s bad. No grapes.
3. Pets. They’re cute and fuzzy and will keep the kids entertained, plus they’ll eat the food that falls to the floor (and there will be a lot of that.) Of course, after Bobo eats a sandwich, some animal crackers (that little cannibal), and a squashed banana, he’ll need to take a “walk.” And since you can’t tell if a dog has to “go”, or if he’s just making faces for fun, you’ll make extremely frequent potty stops, just in case. Oh, that’s not good. No pets.
Tips for traveling with elementary school-age children:
Be wary of long stretches between rest stops. Read those signs carefully! You could find yourself in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from any sign of civilization, with one child wetting his pants, another child vomiting (Remember the carsick toddler? She didn’t outgrow it,) and a third child losing a tooth. In this situation, you should:
1. Drive extremely quickly through the dark night in the middle of nowhere, searching frantically for an exit, any exit, screaming at highway builders, rest stop builders, highway sign makers, your husband (who is in the quiet house again this year), and your car’s manufacturer;
2. Pull over immediately, rest stop or no rest stop, and take care of everything with the efficiency of a drill sergeant, because after all you’ve been doing this for years now and only a rank amateur would pick #1;
3. Ignore the commotion and arrive with wet, stinky children, hand them to the grandparents and mumble, “I hope the tooth fairy knows your address,” as you stalk off to the guest bedroom.
Tips for traveling with “big” kids:
If you happen to open a bottle containing a carbonated beverage of some sort while traveling in a car going 70 miles per hour, and it happens to have suffered a bit of shaking on its way from the cooler to your hand, and it begins to remind you strongly of Mt. Vesuvius, in that it is erupting all over you, you should:
1. Frantically try to put the cap back on, discover you’ve dropped it, shriek loudly and swear profusely while scrabbling around on the floor for the lid, not realizing that holding your head down near the bottle will cause you to absorb most of the cascading liquid with your hair;
2. Lunge forward and cover the entire top half of the bottle with your mouth, attempting to drink the soda (I swear, it wasn’t beer, it was 11 am for God’s sake) as fast as it comes bubbling out, setting yourself up for failure and an enormous belch in the near future, which all the boys in the car will applaud;
3. Hold the bottle out the window, intending to let the drink flow harmlessly out over the top of the bottle, down the sides, and all over your hands, but then realize that when your vehicle is traveling rapidly, so is the bottle, and gravity, combined with basic aerodynamic principles that my husband could happily take all night to explain, plus some other laws of physics I can’t remember, will cause that drink to come right back in the window. Fortunately for you, it gets blown back onto the person sitting behind you, who is now shrieking loudly and swearing profusely;
4. Throw the entire fizzing bottle into the back seat, yelling “hot potato” and later, after drying off everyone’s Game Boy, personal CD player, Ipod, DVD player, and library books, complain that kids today don’t know how to have fun.
Tips for traveling with kids of any age:
Accept the fact that they will undoubtedly learn a few new words from you when things go wrong. And things will go wrong. But you’ll make many happy memories which they will relish repeating to their friends, to illustrate just what dork you are. (“And then she threw the soda into the backseat! No, I’m not kidding! It got all over the Car Bingo.”)
Jun
01