Ugh. Our after-christmas trip to Maryland: a completely, absolutely miserable trip. Beginning to end. My comment to Kevin after we got back: “next summer, either we’re flying down, or people will just have to come up here and see us”. yeah, it was that bad.
The trip down was miserable. Tyler was extremely unhappy to be stuck in the car seat. We stopped often, but that only helped a little bit. On top of that, we hit three separate traffic back-ups. One heading in to New York City, and two in New Jersey. Both of the ones in New Jersey were several mile backups. Several miles of stop-and-go traffic. *Finally*, after what should have been an 8 hour trip turned into a 10 hour trip, we finally made it to Kathy’s.
Thank god, the baby went to bed with no fuss. We were exhausted, and the only thing I had eaten all day was some chicken tenders from a Popeye’s in a rest stop in NJ. I had two pieces of pizza and we went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night, intensely, physically sick (I will spare you the gory details). Suffice to say, I couldn’t even keep a few sips of water down. I called the urgent care nurse and she said it definitely sounded like food poisoning (thanks, Popeye’s!) By 9 pm the next night, I still couldn’t drink anything and began to feel dizzy and woozy. Kathy took me to the emergency room and I spent the next few hours there.
The next day, Kevin started to feel ill, but in a different way. We think he may have caught Bob’s cold or something. So, I felt a little bit better, but Kevin felt worse. We had planned to come home on Wednesday, but on Monday we looked at each other and said “I just want to go home”. so we decided to head home Tuesday. Thankfully, Tyler took a long nap right after we got on the road, so for at least the beginning of the trip it was peaceful. Of course once he woke up, he more than made up for it with spazzing. We finally made it to Connecticut by the evening and Tyler had fallen asleep again. We needed to get gas, but I was afraid to stop because I was afraid he’d wake up. We stopped, I got out, slid my card through the machine, laid my wallet on the roof of the car and started gassing up. Then sure enough, Tyler woke up. I finished with the gas and hurried back into the car, hoping the motion would put him back to sleep.
What I didn’t realize until I got home was that I had left my wallet on the roof of the car. yeah. Instead of getting home and falling into bed, I got home and had to spend two hours on the phone canceling all of my credit cards. what a miserable way to end a perfectly miserable trip.
One small bright spot to the whole mess was finding out that apparently there are still some decent, honest people in the world. The next day, I got a call from a lady in Connecticut who saw my wallet on the on-ramp and not only stopped to get it, but she and her husband ran back and forth trying to pick up everything they could find, because it had scattered. She was even going to pay to send it back, but I told her to please take enough of the cash out to pay for postage back.