Here’s this week’s story:
Title: A Day in Diamond Peak
Story:
As the winter started approaching, Jake and I made some plans to go skiing. We originally had planned to go the first weekend in January. We had our room booked and location picked out and we were all excited to go.
The night before we were scheduled to leave, Nathaniel walked into our room at midnight and said he wasn’t feeling so well. As it turned out, he had a fever of 104. We canceled everything and spent the weekend at home. A week later, he came down with an ear infection. So we waited a bit longer.
The third week of January, we decided it was finally time to try again.
David has tennis lessons that end at 5pm Friday so we decided we would leave right after his lesson. That was mistake one. Not surprisingly, traffic is quite bad on Friday afternoons. It took us two hours to get out of the Bay Area. A few hours into the trip, we stopped to get some quick food and the boys wanted some ice cream. That was mistake two. A few hours after the ice cream, Nathaniel woke up and got sick all over the car. Since this is not something our kids usually do at all, we were poorly prepared. We pulled over, cleaned and changed him and then got back on the road.
Another few hours later, the whole incident repeated itself. And since we were only going away for two days, this meant that Nathaniel was now wearing the last of his spare clothes. The car was smelly enough to make the rest of us sick and what was supposed to be a four and a half hour drive took us seven hours.
To make things even more fun, there was very little snow on the mountain so many of the runs were closed. But all four of us still got a full day of skiing in and had a great time.
Instead of spending half a day on the road, we decided to brave the drive back that same night so we could sleep in our own bed. Fourteen hours of driving for six hours of skiing. This will go down in history as the quickest trip to Tahoe and hopefully the next ones won’t be nearly as painful.
Stories of Twenty Fifteen is a project for 2015. You can read more about it here.
Ugh. I feel your pain, though. We had a similar situation with a snow trip two years ago, except in our case it wasn’t traffic and vomit, but broken water pipes and spilled sno-cone syrup in all the luggage. The story is here if you want to read it and know that you’re not alone!
http://www.cindyderosier.com/2013/03/from-snow-to-volcanoes.html
Ha! Every parent has a story like this at some point. Ours was after a full, very fun day at Disneyland, on our way to visit family in San Diego. One of our daughters complained about her stomach hurting, but we’d just been on lots of rides and it was late and the kids hadn’t been eating super healthy, so I just said “go on to sleep, you’ll be fine.” Poor kid was not fine–she threw up in the car (naturally) and then spent the next three days of our beautiful vacation in SD sick as can be. Funny now, not so funny then. My poor hubby took the van in for a detail-clean twice that week. Hope you are all now on the path to good health!