At the end of my last post, I had a fat lip and pulled every muscle from my neck down, and still had 350 more miles to travel to reach our ultimate destination: the Rio Grande Valley.

Our plan was to leave my sister’s house at 10am, stop in San Antonio for lunch at Chuy’s at 11:30 (shrimp chile rellenos with deluxe tomatillo sauce, anyone?), and be back on the road by 12:30, which would put your average family in the RGV by 5:30. Only, we’re not talking about your average family now, are we?

So we pile into the truck at noon-thirty, hit Chuy’s around 2, and are back on the road at 3ish–nearly three hours late. And rush hour traffic in San Antonio starts around…3ish. Bumper to bumper. Miles and miles. Luckily, our little Public Adress system falls asleep–score! I quietly inform the rest of our passengers that this will be a non-talking flight, thank-you-for-your-cooperation. We’ve got 5 hours ahead of us–5 hours that will pass much less stressfully if he sleeps through most of it. And always one to set a good example, I decide to take a nap, hoping they will follow suit.

The hubby, however, is growing cranky at this point. Flashback to the day before, when he cleaned out my truck so he could pack it up. I don’t know why it took him 4 hours to clean it. I mean, it wasn’t that bad. No, I hadn’t vacuumed it, but come on–those crumbly pieces of rice-cake-shrapnel and wayward-off-brand-cheerios don’t take up that much room, just load the luggage on top of them. Nooooo…..he gets out the shop vac, pulls out floor mats. I think he does it just to make me feel bad, like my way isn’t good enough (although truthfully, I don’t really have a way…). Four hours later, it’s showroom clean and loaded to the ceiling with our gear. And hubby–who for some reason decided to undertake this task shirtless and WITHOUT SUNSCREEN–is sportin’ a painful sunburn on his back. Ooooooo……

Flash forward: Hubby’s back hurts. And he’s sitting in traffic. He’s cranky. He needs back-up. And of course, who does The Hubby turn to for back-up? His trusty side-kick: me. “Find me a way around this mess.” Feeling sorry for him, I pull out the Texas map and ask, “where are we?” Somewhere on the south side of San Antonio. He’s squirming and grimacing, and I decide against asking him to be more specific.

I have owned this particular Texas map for as long as I can remember. It’s old and tattered, and beginning to rip along the creases. As luck would have it, one of those creases runs right through San Antonio, not-so-neatly decaptiating wherever-we-are from where-we-need-to-go. And it’s not a clean cut–no, the edges are soft and bleached out, so there’s about 1/16″ of nothing at all, which is not insignificant when we’re talking about 1″=100 miles. That’s like 6 miles, invisible, uncharted. And all the while The Hubby is throwing out what he really believes are helpful hints about some road he thinks he remembers that will take us to some little podunk town where we can catch some other road that will bring us back. Only it’s not helpful, because the road doesn’t exist, and the podunk town is 40 miles back north, and I’m thinking the sunburn is taking its toll on his mental faculties.

So I’m trying to tune him out while nodding and acting like I’m listening to every word he says while I attempt to fit the map back together–without making any noise that would wake the 4 year-old– and find an alternate route that actuallly exists, and I’m still groggy from being woken up from the beginnings of my chile-relleno-induced carb-coma, when it happens.

Now, when the Hubby cleans the truck, he removes everything. Even essentials. He’s been known to take the stroller out, leave it in the garage, and then be all shocked when we arrive somewhere and I freak out because we don’t have a stroller. To him, clean means empty, with no regard to the fact that the diaper bag is an essential, not clutter.

But while strollers and diapers are often removed as inconsequential, somehow the Flying Purple People Eater was overlooked. Six inches of fuzzy, purple somebody-just-shoot-me-now torture, this gem of an electronic toy sings–you got it–Flying Purple People Eater each time his hand is pressed. Or each time he’s stepped on by a still-half-asleep mother in her battle to conquer a rebellious map. And there’s no off button. I’ve looked. I thought about throwing it out the window, but too late–from the backseat comes the call: “Purple! Purple!” The 4 year-old is awake, and I can’t even blame someone else for it–which, as we all know, is the only consolation a mother often gets in situations like these.

Just like a child will miraculously recover in the doctor’s office waiting room, immediately the traffic clears, and the whole map exercise becomes moot. Which conveniently allows me to shift blame to Hubby, who if he had waited five more minutes wouldn’t have needed to wake me up at all, and Mason would still be asleep and we wouldn’t be listening to “…it had a-one long horn and a-one big eye…” over and over ad naseum for the next 250 miles.

I decided to keep that part to myself….

Next post: there are never any mosquitos in the Valley, and Mason finally finds a way to have some fun in Target….

Tags: alternate route, chile relleno, Chuys, map, Purple People Eater, San Antonio, suburban, sunburn, traffic, travel, vacation

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a while. If you haven’t, please don’t tell me–I’m kinda fragile that way. Let’s just both pretend that you missed me, and everything will be fine.

I have just arrived back from our annual 8-day mega-pilgrimage to the Rio Grande Valley, only this year our 8-day pilgrimage was actually a 10-day pilgrimage due to a family reunion that required us to be safely landed and unloaded at my in-laws by Friday. And technically I haven’t just arrived back; we got back three days ago, but it took me a while to unpack my mind. Same with my suitcase.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the mega-pilgrimage. Every year (hence the ‘annual’ part) we pack the Suburban up to the roof with four kids, twice as many outfits as we’ll wear, half as many DVDs as the kids will require, and two-weeks worth of food to satisfy the various food-issues, and set out on a trip that used to take us 10 hours back before we had kids, but which now takes about 4 hours longer and must be broken into two days of pure mind-clawing torture thanks to the efforts of the Soundtrack, the Narrator, and Ferris Beuler’s Teacher.

You’ve already met the Soundtrack and the Narrator (…with Liberty and Justice for All). Ferris Beuler’s Teacher (FBT) is a 30-pound public address system whose greatest fondness lies in repeating names over and over. Due to sheer probability I’m the target 87% of the time. In action, it sounds something like this:

“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Mama?”
“What?”
“Mama?”
“What is it, dear?”
“Mama?”

The game usually culminates in the target yelling “WHAT DO YOU WANT CHILD?” which is immediately followed by the target being reminded that she is an adult and really needs to remain calm. Which is in turn followed by some snarling and pouting and some daggers being shot from eyes and the words “He started it.”

By the time we completed the first leg of our journey, half of the passengers of the Suburban were ready to strangle the other half, and the feeling was pretty mutual. We spilled out of the overpacked vehicle into the tranquility of my sister’s house on what used to be Lake Travis (and is now a giant sandpit), ready to infect her abode with our chaos.

Now, my hubby is not at all the superstitious sort, but he nonetheless believes there is a certain travel curse that follows me on vacation like the blue-gray smoke out of a 1972 Buick Regal’s tailpipe. According to him, anywhere I go there is bound to be drama, injury, and (of course) the requisite chaos.

Never let it be said that I would disappoint the hubby.

Within moments of entering the house, Mason made a bee-line for a huge framed print on the other side of the great room. He’s fascinated by object d’art that hang on walls, and is obsessed with the notion of freeing them from their seeming captivity. Either that or he figures it would make a pretty cool crashing sound. Seeing him reach up toward the frame, I sprinted across the room to stop him. At full speed, my left foot hit the new blue area rug, which had apparently been purchased from the Acme Cartoon Rug store. The edge my foot was planted on skidded across the floor to meet the opposite edge where my son stood on tiptoe, reaching for the frame, the expanse between the two edges rippling like oversized corrugated metal. Arms poised to the sides like a surfer on a blue shag wave, I skidded to a less-than-graceful stop, while Mason found himself landing with a ‘thud’ on his diaper. Of course, in the process I managed to pull every muscle on the left side of my body.

After my brother-in-law assured me that the frame was so securely mounted to the wall that not even Mason could dislodge it (which I highly doubt…), and after a wonderful meal of grilled chicken sandwiches and a much-needed Shiner, the brother-in-law brought out my niece’s set of stacking blocks. Titled “Attack of the 50 Foot Baby,” each cube-shaped block is made of heavy-duty laminated cardboard, open at the bottom, designed to look like part of a high-rise building with hysterical scenes of people carrying out various absurdities (like bathing cats or throwing TV sets out of windows). When stacked, they reach a combined height of about three feet. But of course the point of the game is for the 50 foot baby to knock them down–a game Mason excells at, I might add. It was funny to watch, right up until the open edge of one of the blocks caught me in the face, driving my upper lip into the edge of my front tooth with the force of…well, I can’t think of a witty comparison, but it was something with a lot of force–enough so to leave me with a busted, bloody lip.

Curse: 2, Me: 0

Obviously, the problem was that Mason had been cooped up too long–first in the car, now in the house. A walk would cure all our ills.

One doesn’t take Mason for a walk. One follows Mason and tries to keep him from eating strange plants or picking up spiders or making dirt angels. So Mason led down the excruciatingly-steep hill to the boat dock, and I followed. And then carried him back up when his little legs proved unable to make the journey. He ran down the road, I followed. Again and again. And again. It started to rain, much to Mason’s delight, and there was no convincing him to head back toward the house, so I had to carry him, writhing and wailing all the way.

I have been told more than once by self-proclaimed experts on the matter that Croc flip-flops should never, ever be worn on wet surfaces. Given the source, I figured it was more a alcohol issue than a footwear issue. My theory was dismissed the minute my foot hit the front porch.

There is a motherly instinct that will keep a child safe even at the sacrifice of the mother’s own body. As I went down, that instinct wrapped my hand around Mason’s head and twisted my body so that I took the force of the fall…directly on my already-blown-out right shoulder.

As I lay dazed on the cement, Mason uncharacteristically calmed by the commotion, I realized that the only thing worse than the pain that told me I had now pulled every muscle on the right side of my body was the fact that my sister and brother-in-law, in their infinite attention to all things that epitomize style, had a full-length glass entry door that allowed the hubby a perfect view of my performance.

In case you’re keeping score: 3-0. Not in my favor. And we’re only 6 hours into our vacation….

I wish I could tell you it ended there, that the rest of our trip passed by in blissful uneventfulness. But then, that would be someone else’s blog now, wouldn’t it?

To be continued….

Tags: Chaos, crocs, curse, Food Allergies, injuries, journey, Narrator, Rio Grande Valley, Soundtrack, travel, trip, vacation