Today is Eric's sister's birthday. Happy day, Laura!
The trip...
A couple of weeks ago, Eric went off one of his drugs. It is progress, and we are glad. The only problem is the violent mood swings that accompany withdrawal from a mood-altering medication. After a couple of tense moments, I wondered how in the hell we would endure much less enjoy our time to refresh ourselves. Eek.
Aside from a couple of emotional days and shivers, he was OK. I was glad. My mood feeds off his a lot. Our poor children.
Anyway, we weighed ourselves before we left, hoping to be somewhat near those weights when we returned. Nevermind the numbers, dahlings. Let's just say one of us did better than the other. (Pie, people. Eric wanted pie. For two meals in a row. Then we had doughnuts for breakfast the next morning. The pie: Eric had triple chocolate coffee for lunch, with banana split for dinner. I had blackberry peach and coconut cream. Kayleigh went with the Dutch apple for lunch, chocolate cream for dinner. Kelsey's choices were triple cherry and triple chocolate coffee. Eric was in love with that place--The Pie Place. As for me--well, I've had better.)
I'm weird about driving places. When I leave, I want to get where I'm going. I want to stop only for gas. If you need to pee, you wait until we stop for gas. If you're hungry, you wait until we stop for gas. If we've decided to take a fun route on the way somewhere and stop to see fun stuff, that's different. Those stops and the time they take are in my head before we leave. We hadn't made such a plan for the first day of this trip.
Less than an hour (!) into the drive, one of us had to pee. The mention of a toilet made another need to pee. I was not pleased. I don't like stopping at restaurants or gas stations to use their bathrooms. They're often filthy, and it's a little rude to just walk to the back of Subway, do your thing, and then take off without buying anything. Also, if you stop anywhere that sells anything--food, gifts, clothes, anything--the kids want something. It makes me nuts. Are they hungry? No, but they really need a bag of Nibs and a Kit Kat and a lemonade and a bag of Doritos and they promise to share and not to spill, so what's the problem? And could they just get that blown glass sea turtle with the plastic Panamanian flag stuck in the bottom? It's only $14.
I said I thought there was a rest stop about 15 minutes up the highway. Said persons really hoped I was right, which made me doubt myself, so we pulled into the Dells. Yeah.
Anyway, I tried hard not to let pissing in every county bug me so much. By the end of the trip, I had succeeded.
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5 comments:
the pie place up the shore? did you go to betty's pies, too? did you make it to the ben franklin in grand marais?
you gotta stop and pee. you just gotta. subway don't mind. they're billionares. they can afford the toilet paper.
Yup, The Pie Place up the shore in Grand Marais. We didn't go to Betty's Pies, but we went past it longingly. We did, in fact, go to the Ben Franklin on your recommendation. Kelsey was in a state of bliss. Kayleigh bought three airplanes.
Stopping to pee when there are four people, two of them children, isn't always easy. I know, I'm weird. But it's not that hard to hold your pee. If I can hold it all the way to New Zealand, surely we can hold it until we need gas.
Part of it is my competitive nature, always wanting to stay ahead of people. If someone passes me who I passed earlier, it irritates me. It's sick, really. That's why I tried to settle down about the whole thing.
it's hard for kids to hold pee. i remember agonizing trips up the north shore as a child, stuck in the back of my great-aunt's lilac-colored cadillac, needing desperately to pee, while my grandfather (her brother) refused to stop because he was waiting for a gas station that gave out S&H Green Stamps.
the agony, the agony, the agony. every bump. every crack in the road....
i was smaller than your daughters. but i have empathy nonetheless...
I'm smiling, and I apologize. But I'm just picturing your tortured face, and "every crack in the road" is so well phrased.
I probably go in the opposite direction because my dad had to pee so often. We never went anywhere that he didn't have to pee. Sometimes he would just pull over to the side of the road and let fly. He kept a urinal in the car for those times he couldn't find a deserted road. He'd apologize, then fill the car with the smell of hot piss.
your dad and my granddad would not have gotten along.
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