By: Revanche

Long weekends: a first road trip

April 22, 2015

We recently experienced a little improvement in quality of life, and so decided to take on another challenge.

Since none of my family had met the newbie yet, and his family was ready to take another crack at it, we loaded up a rental and drove down the coast.  Here’s how it went….

Night 1: we left an hour and a half behind schedule. I blame Enterprise. They botched pickup, they didn’t have the car at the location even after I confirmed with them two days in advance AND they didn’t have a clean car ready to go when PiC finally arrived at the 2nd location where the cars were allegedly ready. They threw us exactly 1.5 hours behind.

We rented a minivan because STUFF and we wanted to be safer w/Seamus and LB. I hate not being able to crate him for the drive but there is no way to fit a Seamus-sized crate in the car. A truck, sure, but I’m not a fan of popping the dog in the truck bed, exposed to the elements. And LB, of course, requires a car seat and numerous other accoutrements. We tried to minimize as much as possible and consider this a learning experience for future packing.

I haaate running out of diapers and paying full price so I packed nearly 100. For 5.5 days away. It’s called pooperation, alright? I also packed twice as many doggy poo bags as Seamus could use. Very little worse than being stuck in a shitty situation with no clean up available.

Surprise: LB still hates being strapped into the car seat and hates sitting still in the car but loves freeway driving. We prepared our souls for multiple stops and screaming, instead ze slept the whole first 4 hour leg.

Day 2: we made an extra stop on Leg 2, making it 2 of 3 stretches before we made it the Home Base and that 45 minute delay put us in the middle of hellish traffic. 2:30 and like a bloody spider, GPS showed traffic stretched out every direction from the body of LA. Of course. It was a quick tutorial in why we can never move back. Every trip would take at least 45 minutes, if not 2 hours, because our friends and family are scattered everywhere.

LB ran out of “sitting in a car seat, putting up with freeway” steam at the tail end of Leg 3 so we rode the rest of the way serenaded by hir increasingly ragged roars. We slept pretty well that night, when we slept. It was a parody of our routine at home: sleep til ze wakes, one stumbles to get the bottle and the other weaves over to the sofa with hir, both collapse while ze is fed and patted back down. Stay on the sofa the rest of the night.

Day 3: Most of the morning and afternoon was spent recovering from the long drive and then ze finally met part of my family that night. Ze was full of chatter and what we call “crab bubbles” and then crashed hard.

We got to visit with some friends briefly that evening, and wind down almost like regular people, except we had to keep checking on LB since we didn’t bring a monitor.

Day 4 was the most intense day. We had a morning to early afternoon engagement, a small reunion, and ze decided that since we had to be up at 715 anyway, why not get up at 620 and stay up?

Thanks to, again, SoCal traffic, we didn’t get home til after 3, and then it was back out again for a dinner. This dragged on far longer than was civilized for a tiny infant and ze passed out in the car. Blessedly, this was the night of the long sleep. Ze actually stayed asleep for 8 hours. Hadn’t happened before, hasn’t happened since. But boy did we need it.

Day 5 was one last hurrah gathering of family and arguably the best one. LB was whisked away by Grandma, only to be seen again when hungry, then whooshed off to a cuddle and feeding with Grandpa. Aunts and Great Grandma finished up the rounds of baby passing and ze fell asleep in PiC’s arms. I don’t see this branch of the family often enough and boy do I miss them. Ze was also surprised with a handful of amazingly timed baby gifts: all things ze needed and I hadn’t even thought to mention them to anyone. Psychic family, I tell ya.

Logistics!

Packing. We were pretty sure that we overpacked but didn’t want to take the risk that going too minimalist would be to my detriment. I can only handle so much manual stuff, before you factor in the stress of travel, disrupted routines, and the energy drain of socializing.

Turns out we didn’t need: the spare cozy blanket (we brought two heavy/cozy and one light blankets, 2 were used regularly); the baby carriers (we were too tired to wear hir); a picnic blanket. I could also have packed about 10 fewer diapers but let’s never skimp on packing diapers because I don’t want to pay full price or live with regrets.

Feeding the Bean. I planned to do combination pumping and formula for hir feeding so we could be flexible. Turned out we didn’t need most of our handy formula packets. When I didn’t have enough prepumped milk packed, I nursed hir, and most days I was able to get nearly 20 oz in just two pumping sessions. Really quite convenient.

Costs. The car rental was nearly $400, and of course we had to fill up about three times. We stayed at places with breakfast provided and packed enough food and drinks along in our cooler so that we only paid for takeout twice. The convenience of not having to cram everything into our smaller cars and risking things falling over on Seamus or fighting with squeezing stuff into every inch was so worth that outlay.

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