we are finally back home after a crazy busy two weeks. the day after christmas (merry belated christmas, as well), gus, sophie and i left for houston to go and help my mom move out of her house. i knew it would be bad--i had always thought it was going to be the trip from hell because a) sophie has never been on an extended car trip and gets impatient driving gus to school; b) my mom has lived in her house for 27 years and is VERY emotionally attached to it and c) my mom also has a slight tendency to hoard, so her rather large house is rather stuffed full of, well, stuff...and it is very hard to convince her to part with anything. so it was always going to be bad.
what i didn't foresee was that gus was going to contract a stomach virus, which kicked in two hours into the trip.
yep, that's right. i had a vomiting child in the car with me and sophie for two days. it was truly the trip from hell. the first day we stopped about a dozen times and ultimately ended up spending the night in fort stockton, texas. i was under the complete delusion that gus was throwing up because he had motion sickness (which he does get, just not usually on car trips) and that eventually his body would absorb enough dramamine to make him stop throwing up. it didn't happen. it did, however, create pretty orange designs all over my car. i kept asking him what he wanted to do--did he want to go home or go to houston--and every time he said he wanted to keep going. oddly, he felt fine after each episode--that was why i never suspected a virus (to my/our peril).
when we finally checked in to the hotel he really went downhill and started feeling terrible. sophie wouldn't go to sleep so she kept bugging him; the only pharmacy in town (wal-mart) closed at 6:00 p.m. and didn't reopen until 9:00 in the morning; and the urgent care center that served like a 100 mile radius was completely booked solid with patients having actual life-threatening disorders. gus wasn't dehydrated at that time so there was no way i was going to take him and sophie and go sit in a waiting room all night. we were 500 miles from home, 550 miles from where we needed to be--we were completely stuck.
eventually sophie went to sleep and gus stopped being sick long enough to snooze and the next day we headed out for houston. we got there at night, checked into a really nice hotel near my mom's house and went to bed. i genuinely thought i would have to sell my car after that experience, but the good people at bubbles car detailing took care of it and made it smell more like some form of chemical smart bomb had gone off in my car rather than what it had been. it still smells like a chemistry experiment in my car--there is no telling what it is doing to us. gus does have some lingering psychological damage from the experience, which might make me have to sell it anyway. poor gus.
suprisingly, the rest of the trip didn't seem too bad in comparison.
No comments:
Post a Comment