Worst. Trip. Ever.

Not *my* worst trip, even though I was there, but certainly my mom and dad's.

They decided to take 1 year old me to Yellowstone Park. From mid-lower Michigan.

In July.

In a Ford LTD that *did not* have air conditioning.

They gave me a little Coca-Cola to help hydrate me.

I developed diarrhea about halfway through the ride to Yellowstone.

The slight upside--My mom tells me I was basically in good spirits during the entire trip.

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Post-script: Every car my dad has owned since has had air conditioning.

You would only be "feeling a bit peaked" if you climbed a molehill.

Nothing quite so bad. Last spring, we took our first family drive to Florida, with out then-ten month old son and my wife's 10 year old niece. About 90 miles from home, before we even left Indiana, our son had the mother of all projectile vomits. It took about 20 minutes to clean the car and the car seat, and the odor is still there when the car has been closed up and left in the sun. There were several small aftershocks throughout the day, all much more containable but coming at inopportune times (in the middle of Nashville rush hour, for instance). He had never been carsick before and never has since, but that day was rough. When we stopped for dinner in north Georgia, literally as soon as the car came to a stop, our niece spewed about 5 gallons of puke in the Chick-fil-a parking lot. I said to my wife, "if that had happened in the car, you realize we would have had to abandon it by the side of the road and start over, right?" My wife was and is pregnant with #2, and she of course got violently ill the next morning in the hotel. I felt like sticking my finger down my throat just to fit in.

I have only been carsick once, when I was about seven years old. Although I remember it, until my parents reminded me, I had forgotten that on the same trip, my sister and my cousin, then both two years old, had decided that using gravel to draw on the side of my parents' brand new car was a dandy idea. I guess that was their trip from hell.

You would only be "feeling a bit peaked" if you climbed a molehill.

"Peaked" as in "pea-kedd," not "peek'd".

It was July, a road trip between Seattle and Minneapolis, a family from babies to parents having gotten extreme diarrhea, and the kind with abdominal cramps so painful...it's all too horrific to recount. I have PTSD from this trip, I could be diagnosed. Sh-t, screaming, pain, heat, hours of isolated roads with creepy gas station attendants. Use your imagination and it would not go too far. When we got back we should have burned the car and everything in it and bleached ourselves inside and out. Through the worst of it there was just no place to stop, we drove maybe 26 hours straight, groaning and dying. Never. Again. I think I would embrace Rod's awful trip, vomit so fresh, so clean, so much less embarrassing and offensive to be covered with, you and your children, in public, compared to this.

Our worst trip ever involved traveling to Florida to see my ailing Grandfather, who was clearly dying of cancer at this point. We went to see him for the last time, and watching his deteriorating condition once we arrived was sad. Anyway, on the way, with this on our minds, our car broke down on I-95. Dad ended up having to get out of the car in the rain and walk to the next exit, so us kids had to wait in the car for a long time, when he arrived with a tow truck. That part was miserable.

The nice thing is that we ran into wonderful people in a small South Carolina town. We stayed in the shadow of South of the Border, which is south of the North Carolina border, a schaltzy tourist trap with a Mexican theme. Our van was fixed the next day, and we were back on the road.

vomit so fresh, so clean

Oh my. Oh my. Your trip really was worse. I can't sympathize, because I can't even imagine.

My second-worst trip ever involved a long car trip from Louisiana to northern Illinois, in the summer of 1983. I was 16, a sullen teenager who did not want to be on a trip anywhere with my family. Both of my parents are fairly heavy smokers, too. On that long, two-day car trip, they smoked and smoked and smoked. They cracked their windows, and handed me and my sister surgical masks to wear. It was horrible.

But not as horrible as the way back. Same deal with the cigarettes and the surgical masks, but this time we decided to take the scenic route home through the Ozarks. Uppppp...and...downnnnnn the hills we went. We were kind of lost, too, which made Mama smoke more and gripe more. And I got really carsick in the back seat.

When the car pulled into the yard at our house, all four of us flew out of the car like corn kernels that had just popped. And I said never again! I suspect they all felt the same way.

Wow. I thought I had it bad. Two tales of woe, neither of which match up with the Carload Of Diarrhea From Hell, but still.
Tale #1. My globetrotting grandmother decided suddenly that she just had to leave Spokane and come visit us in Portland for a few weeks, but for some reason known only to Grandma, she refused to take the bus (Grandma always called it "the stage") and wanted us to come and get her. No big deal; the Portland to Spokane run is about seven hours and we could stay overnight with old family friends, so one fine and early Saturday morning we took off eastbound on I-80. I had awakened feeling a bit headachy and gassy, but thought it would pass. It passed, all right. The diarrhea began at about Cascade Locks, forty miles east of Portland, and continued unabated for the next three hundred miles. Unlike the East, there are many long and empty stretches on interstates in the West, and once one gets on the dry side of the Cascades, there often isn't as much a sagebrush bush for concealment. Rest stops and gas stations are few and far between. I had my wife angle the VW microbus so that I had some small privacy from cars on our side of the road, but it must not have been pretty for the folks heading the other direction. It took us ten hours to make that seven hour run, and when we finally arrived, our hostess had prepared a marvelous supper in our honor, which I had to pass up. Her husband made a jocular comment about how I could thread a needle at fifty paces, but I was too weak to kill him.
Tale #2. We had been staying with my grandparents in Missoula, Montana for about a week. Our baby son, Matthew, had been fussy for the last day before we left, but nothing seemed to be really wrong with him, and I had to get back to Portland to go to work the next day, so we got started early on an eleven hour run. For those who have never been in the Northwest, western Montana and pretty much all of northern Idaho is one mountain range after another; lots of elevation gained and lost along the way. Matthew began shrieking as we began climbing, about an hour west of Missoula, and literally didn't stop for the rest of the trip. We stopped in Spokane, and fortunately found a clinic open on a Saturday. Turns out Matt had an ear infection, and he could not relieve the pressure when we gained or lost elevation. They dosed him with antibiotics and and a sedative. The antibiotics worked, but the sedative didn't. As I mentioned in Tale #1, it's seven hours from Spokane to Portland. Seven long hours.

Let's see. I've had my share of long car trips, so I have a lot to compare to. For the trip itself being awful (as compared to the reason for the trip)?

I'm guessing that it was summer of '77. Most of the trip was standard-awful. Packing about 7 kids into a compact car with a father who decided that around two potty breaks a day was enough, no matter what, and whose goal was to get there as fast as possible, with no sleep and as much 'legal speed' as possible. So he was a joy and a pleasure to travel with.

But that was most of our trips. What made this one extra special awful? Well, there was the breakfast at a diner that included sour milk. I couldn't eat 'Life' cereal for years after that.

There was the motel (my stepmother insisted, finally) with the rat in the pool. Then finally, her freaking out after hearing the news, and going immediately into deep mourning. She was the right age, she was from Tennessee, and... Turns out Elvis had died.

Yeah, that one was memorably bad.

I was only seventeen.

Five hours on a 747 on the MSP tarmac in August of 1998 with no aircon, no ignition, no info from the attendants, no food, but they did have bottled water, thank God. Missed my connection at Tokyo Narita and got delayed until the next evening, but the last free Northwest shuttle from the hotel was at 9 AM. Ten hours in the Narita international terminal is a study in purgatory on earth. Clancy

Also, in March of 2002, I made it through security with my shoes and onto the plane, which was the last one cleared to for takeoff before a spring blizzard came through. Just as we pulled back from the jetway, there was a WHUMP from the front of the plane as a luggage trolley hit it at about 15 mph and put a hole in the side. Needless to say, I got delayed until the next morning.

1997, Thanksgiving. On a coach train from Daejon to Kwangju in South Korea. Old lady, no teeth, dried squid, no dental floss, three hours, nuff said.

I was driving back to Dallas from Houston in the middle of the night with my family. My step-father was having a risky cancer surgery and we wanted to be there. About 2 in the morning we stopped at a Jack-in-the-box somewhere and i decided to get some tacos and a jumbo jack. I arrived home and went to sleep. giving the salmonella just enough time to work its magic. about 5am I woke up and started puking. My step-brother who was also staying at the house came to get me because it was time to go to the hospital, I told him, "I am to sick to go" He called me a baby or wimp or possibly something much more derogatory, in the loving way that only a brother can do. He said, "lets stop at walmart and get some pepto" In the walmart I handed my brother the pepto because the urge to throw up had hit me I ran into the parking lot to be nice to old Sam Walton and not throw up all over his story. My brother paid for the medicine and a banana and we got in the car and left. Me running out of the store must have looked suspicious to the minimum wage security guard and he decided to call the police. about a mile down the road on the way to the hospital, we were pulled over at gun point and accused of stealing. I so wish I had puked on the cop that pulled me over.