Home Sweet Home

Friday morning dawned clear and bright in Charleston, SC (and hot, but that probably goes without saying). The girls and I made the executive decision to attempt to make the 11+ hour drive home in one day. From Charleston  to home is around 680 miles, which is definitely drivable in a day.....or so you would think. But when you're driving down the highway at 70+ miles an hour in South Carolina and your youngest daughter pukes all over herself it kind of puts a damper on the journey. Especially when the other daughter is giving you a play-by-play of the vomit-fest from her vantage point in the backseat, sitting directly beside said puker. What's a parent to do?

Well, this parent pulled over at the next exit and hosed her daughter off in a Hardee's restroom - hardly the ideal spot but beggars can't be choosers. After Maya's clothes were changed and the car was as clean as I could get it without using a pressure washer, we hopped back on the highway. Needless to say, that incident cost us some serious time, and I was a little worried about Maya. She proceeded to pass out for a few hours until we were in the mountains of West Virginia. That was about the time a thunderstorm decided to hit, and although it was not even 6pm it looked like it was midnight as all light had left the sky. Add in a lot of lightning, thunder and a torrential downpour and throw in some heavy winds and you have my basic recipe for being scared shitless while driving. So we decided to pull over in good old Beckley, WV for the night. (Yay for me that I had the foresight to book a hotel room "just in case".)

I checked into the hotel, hosed Maya off some more in the shower and headed to dinner, as she had perked up a little due in part to napping through multiple southern states. I guess we were boring company though, because she almost fell asleep face down in her pasta. As soon as humanly possible I got her back to the hotel room and she passed out for about 12 hours. When Maya vomits or shows other symptoms of being ill, I kind of maybe possibly turn into Stresserella, or so I've been told. But because she is immunosuppressed and can get sick very easily, I have good reason. I kept putting cold washcloths on her forehead and racking my brain on what I should do if she got worse. Call her doctors? Find a children's hospital? Call the National Guard to Med-Vac her? I was in the mountains of West Virginia, so my options were kind of limited. However, at 7:30 in the morning the dear child woke up and asked if the hotel would give us breakfast. She was completely recovered and had all of her energy back (and then some). So after breakfast we hopped back on the road and made the 4 1/2 hour journey back to home sweet home - where I promptly cleaned out my car with detergent and an industrial vacuum cleaner. The puke smell is almost gone, but I'm sure the memories will last forever.