Bad car trips...chapter two

I hope everyone's Christmas was great. Ours was great in some ways and absolutely awful in others.

Apparently, we are cursed with having bad car trips. This is the second installment in our Traveling Sucks Journal. Click here for the first installment.

We left home at around 4:30p.m. on Monday, the 22nd. We drove to somewhere in Kentucky and stayed the night. We woke up early Tuesday morning to drive the rest of the way to St. Louis. It should have been a 5 hour drive. Then the ice storm hit and a car in front of us slid off the right side of the interstate, then back on, hitting a tractor trailer in the process. We all stopped. Everyone was fine. The roads were a solid sheet of ice. We drove 30 mph the rest of the way until a bad accident caused the entire westbound side of the interstate to come to a complete stop for about 30 minutes. These things combined made our 5 hour drive an 8 hour one. Not so good for little Ben. Danny handled it ok, but Ben cried himself to sleep at one point. Not happy.

The visit with Kevin's family was terrific. We loved seeing everyone and had a great time, despite the fact that Danny doesn't handle big groups of people well and had a small meltdown on Christmas Eve during which time he missed the annual visit by Santa Claus. Also, Danny needs his sleep. He sleeps a solid 10-11 hour block every night. He goes to bed between 8:30 and 9:00. St. Louis is in central time, so the 9:00 visit from Santa was actually 10:00 to poor Dan. He wasn't in a good mood. But we got through that, no problem.

We left to come home on Saturday, the 27th at around 4:30 or 5:00 with the plan being that we would drive 4 or 5 hours to Louisville, Kentucky to stay the night. About a half hour into the drive, torrential rain started coming down. I'm not exaggerating that I was looking for tornadoes. It was raining sideways and the wind was blowing the car all over the road. I was feeding the boys grapes and milk to try and keep their little minds off the terrible storm, when Ben started throwing up all over himself. We stopped the car at a gas station and I took him inside in the pouring rain to clean him up. The car seat wasn't too bad, so we just cleaned everything the best we could and started out on the road again.

A half hour later, more barfing. Rapid fire, like 5 times in a row. He was crying. I was crying. He threw up on my arm at one point. The car seat at this point was hideous. Vomit in the cracks and crevices. The car reeked. We had to stop early. No hotels anywhere. We checked the Garmin. No hotels for 25 miles. Except for one little, crappy, very creepy Budget Inn somewhere in Illinois.

We stopped at this place, hoping against hope that they would have a washer and dryer to put the car seat cover in. No luck.

I washed the car seat in the sink as best I could and laid it across the heating vent hoping it would dry by morning.

That didn't happen, so the next morning, we put garbage bags and grocery bags all over the thing, then covered those with t-shirts and packed everyone up.

We drove the 9 hours home in a car that smelled of puke. It was way too long of a drive for Ben, especially considering he didn't feel well. We all felt kind of sick from being in that car.

We made it home. Ben seems to be feeling better. No one else has been sick...yet...please God, don't let us all start barfing. I hate being sick like that.

I'm almost afraid to plan another trip to St. Louis. Maybe we should start flying.