It’s not a family vacation unless someone throws up
Jason Offutt
The Toddler puked 28 minutes into our family vacation. We hadn’t even made it out of the county.
Standing outside the minivan as my wife cleaned child-processed Cheerios off the car seat, I watched the Toddler scoot along a dirt lane that ran between two fields. She was naked except for her shoes.
“Is this what our trip’s going to be like?” I asked my wife.
She handed me a diaper, a change of clothes and pointed to our child who was busy communing with nature.
“I hope not. Now deal with that.”
Family vacations are terrifying bits of togetherness that start with the best intentions. I think the Crimean War started that way.
Taking the children to Mount Rushmore sounded like a good idea, at least at the time. We were going to see mountains, history and presidents, all in one simple 1,600-mile round trip in a vehicle too small to allow for personal space.
Cool, right?
Sure.
“Oh, turn right here,” my wife said less than 45 minutes later.
Buying the road atlas was, I’d thought, a good idea. I’d used one on a drive to Canada a few years ago. Not that I needed it, of course, with Canada being north and all. I enjoyed the atlas for the points of interest, scenic routes and historical markers websites should make easy to read but never do.
My wife, as is her habit, took the atlas and went insane with it.
“There’s a scenic route just over there.”
“Through Hamburg, Iowa?” I asked.
She nodded, her attention glued to the book in her lap.
“We going to the strip joint there?”
She looked up. “What?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
Scenic routes mean different things to different people. This scenic route was a beautiful rural highway with heavily wooded bluffs to the right, river bottoms to the left – until the highway split with no signs to tell us which way to go.
“Are you lost?” the Boy asked from the back seat.
We now drove down a gravel road. “Yes.”
“Are we there yet?” the Girl asked from the middle seat.
“No.”
“If we’re lost are we going to run out of food and water and die?”
“No.”
“I have to poop.”
And so forth until I went mad, the end.
No, wait. The story’s not over. We haven’t talked about Mike.
When we finally hit Interstate 29, billboards greeted us that read, “Annabelle’s Adult Superstore,” and, “Olivia’s Exotic Boutique.”
“Did you ever notice,” my wife asked, the atlas thankfully folded shut on her lap, “that adult stores are always named after women?”
No. I really hadn’t.
“They’re never named after men. You know, like Mike.” She paused, and came back with a New York accent. “Mike’s Sexy Lady Emporium. We got sexy lady things.”
This is one of the many reasons I love my wife.
“Mike has to have a moustache,” I said. “And gold chains.”
“Obviously,” she said. “Hey, you got a sexy lady? We got her things. Come on in. It’s Mike’s Sexy Lady Emporium.”
Maybe this family vacation wouldn’t be so bad after all.
“Baby puked again,” came from the back of the van.
Or not.
