Children, Chocolate and Winding Roads

If the thought of vomit makes you vomit, quit reading right now.  Everybody else:  READ ON!

I originally wrote this several months ago.  When I asked my daughter to read it through, she asked, “Who is your target audience?” As if not everyone wants to hear about this.  I assured her that moms, potential moms, and children with a propensity to vomit will relate. Nevertheless, I set it aside to reconsider.  Then it occurred to me last night that Christmas is actually the season of children, too much chocolate and long, often winding drives!  Thus, it’s possible some of you have recently experienced something similar with children or grandchildren.  It’s all part of the human experience.

The child that this refers to shall remain nameless; she was about ten years old at the time. 

We had spent the day with our cousins in Santa Clarita out the 5 Freeway (poetically known as the Golden State Freeway), near Magic Mountain.  We were driving back down to Huntington Beach in the evening, about a one-and-a-half hour drive, if traffic is moving. 

Kids and cousins. The heroic one is on the far right (keep reading)!

We had spent the afternoon in the pool, eaten a big dinner with them, finished up with dessert (deep, dense chocolate) and this daughter then proceeded to drink two glasses of chocolate milk (Ovaltine, actually). We all piled into my sister’s Suburban:  Kathy and I in the front, three kids in the middle row and two kids in the back, with the far back stuffed with luggage and other paraphernalia. 

We got to the freeway and it’s a standstill. Everybody was leaving Magic Mountain and the traffic jam went on forever.  It would take hours.  So, we decided to take the road that roughly (very roughly) paralleled the freeway.  It was dark and fairly winding, but we were moving along just fine.  We were in a section of open country, not suburbs, and heading south, toward the north end of the San Fernando Valley.

The kid with the full stomach was watching a movie on a small portable DVD player.  At some point, she said, “I don’t feel good.  I think I’m going to throw up.” 

There was nowhere to pull off and, even if there had been, it was very isolated and didn’t feel safe. So I grabbed a plastic trash bag (back when they were still legal) and quickly handed it to her. She opened the bag and vomited. Over the bag, not into it.  Nothing at all in the bag.  It drenched the DVD player, all of her and her clothing, puddled on the floor, and all over the seat.  It was ugly.

We had no choice but to keep driving while opening the windows, and the poor child was sitting in a pool of vomit.

We finally started getting to civilization.  Do we get off at a gas station?  Oh! There’s a hotel, that would be good, but it’s waaaay too skeezy. Keep going. It’s a good 15 minutes until we came upon a no-name hotel which doesn’t look dangerous. The old kind. But the child obviously needed a shower, we needed to clean the car, and we were desperate.

We pulled in. There wasn’t even an open lobby; it had a drive-up window.  We told the guy that we only needed a room for an hour to shower.  He had limited English and we went round and round and finally told him yes, one person for the night.  We pulled up to the room.

I took my daughter into the shower, stripped her down and started washing. My sister, meanwhile was working on the Suburban.  I can’t tell you how thankful I was that since it was my child, I was able to be in the room and working the shower routine. We got her cleaned up and dried off, including hair.  Our luggage had a change of clothes.  I rinsed the barfy clothes and even the DVD player, figuring it was shot anyway. Made good progress. The rest of the kids were just hanging out.  But my poor sister.

Kathy was outside cleaning the car.  I swear there must have been a gallon of liquid plus food.  It was horrendous.  It was disgusting.  It was a real problem. The vomit was not only in the footwell, but had gone through the floor and was dripping out under the car. She started with the motel towels and water from the ice bucket, trying to clean it enough to get home.  She’d mop it up, bring in the towels, and I’d rinse them in the bath tub. Outside again for round two.  And three.  There just weren’t enough towels and it wasn’t working.  So we stripped the sheets off the bed and started using those to try to clean the car.  Made some progress. 

By the time we had finished, we had used every. single. piece of material in the hotel room, except the bedspread and curtains. I think the blanket was sacrificed.  We did our best to wash it all out, but there was only so much we could do.  We piled it all in the bathtub. This all took a good hour.

Meanwhile, there are only so many seats in the car and someone had to sit on the barfy spot. Kathy did have a couple of beach towels, so we covered it as best we could, and Kathy’s daughter heroically offered to sit there (see picture above).  The car still stank, but we could make it home. 

We went to check out of the hotel, telling the nice man that we’re sorry but there is a lot of laundry in the room. I can’t believe he would have been able to imagine the extent of it. Or the smell. But what could we do? We figured maybe they’d put an extra charge on the credit card, but they never did. We deserved a major surcharge.

Of course this was in the days before GPS, but we finally found the freeway, which by now had cleared.  We got home, tucked them all into bed and the day was done.  But it was definitely an experience neither I, nor my sister, nor any of the kids, will ever forget. 

Lesson learned:  no chocolate milk and videos on a windy road. Especially in the dark.

If you've every had a similar experience, then you know the horror of it all. If not, be thankful, but also realize there is still time left for new experiences!