Our recent Thanksgiving trip reminded me of the joys we face each time we travel. We do it to see loved ones. We do it for fun. We do it because we can’t spend 365 days holed up in this house together. Why not take our craziness on the road, spend a load of cash, and wonder why we don’t do this more often? That’s what I’m wondering by the end of every trip….
10) My daughter, who can hold it all day no matter how much I beg, suddenly has to go when we’ve reached the rural part of our trip and no businesses can be seen for many miles.
9) When the cooler is empty, the kids can’t agree on which disgusting fast-food restaurant we’ll dine at. Then whoever picked it will inevitably not like their dry, crusty meal. Someone always has to return to the counter for sauce, and the workers don’t see you standing there no matter how long you patiently wait.
8) At any roadside location the bathroom stalls, hardly large enough for me to turn around and squat in, can be excruciatingly small when you are trying to avoid the liquid on the floor, cover the seat with tissue, and keep your daughter’s pants from touching anything. Somehow I have managed on past trips to hold an infant on my hip, expertly maneuver button and zipper with one hand, and keep my toddler standing and out of said puddles with my patented whisper-scream all in this 1-foot-by-1-foot space. Oh it can be done.
7) The kids fight for the top bunk, bottom bunk, left side of the bed, or right side of the bed, and the loser makes sure the night is ruined for the rest of us. One kid wants the light on; one wants the light off. One wants music on; one does not. Just GO TO SLEEP!
6) The later the kids go to bed, the earlier they wake up in the morning.
5) Forgetting my husband’s deodorant means he has to use mine. He smells lovely and breezy for a few hours. When I use my tube the next day, I find some really, really long hairs glued to it. Gross.
4) No matter what thrilling event you have spent hours planning for the next day, the kids will gripe that it’s boring and their feet hurt, and you can forget any educational stuff you looked up. They don’t want to hear it.
3) The last hour of the trip, they must ask every two minutes, “When are we going to be there?” Now I know how my dad felt.
2) When we finally pull in the driveway, the kids can only carry one thing and they both have to go to the bathroom—the same one—at the same time.
1) Man, I don’t care how much laundry there is. There’s no place like home.
Mom in the Muddle 
Number eight made me cringe – ahh, the horror of public bathrooms with little ones! And I think you are way to kind allowing your husband access to your deodorant. I would rather deal with nasty underarm man stank for the brief time it would take me to find a store and get him some deodorant of his own. I love your list – there is no place like home, for sure. 🙂
I let him borrow it and didn’t think much of it…until I saw those nasty hairs on it. Ew. Next time, he will go to the store immediately. There will be no stink either. ; )
I completely understand your pain. Three days in Boyce was exhausting.
With a 1 and 3 year-old I can relate! Although emergency potty stops can be so annoying (especially when they are requested seven seconds after you get on the freeway, after your kid had insisted that he didn’t need to pee at the last stop) if our son hadn’t done that on our last trip we would have missed out on hand feeding the 5lb squirrels that happened to live at the next rest stop. Silver linings, right?
There’s one way to look at it. And hey, no trying to squeeze into those stalls like a pack of clowns in a clown car! Five-pound squirrels. Looks like they’ve hit the jackpot.
We went on a family vacation this summer. It was the first trip we had taken with everybody since our 2004 RV trip around America (NINE THOUSAND MILES with three teens who called it the RV Trip of Boredom – I really have to write about that trip). Anyway, our youngest just started college and our oldest just finished college. I thought traveling with older, more mature children would be different – NOPE.
In other words, I have a long way to go. One good thing, they’ll be able to go to the bathroom alone by then. I hope.
Yes, #8 and #6 improved dramatically with age.By the time the rest of the points improve, I doubt I’ll be able to go to the bathroom without their help.