Getting There

Our trip to Florida started, well, shall we say unconventionally. Usually we leave for Florida during the week before Christmas and head back north before New Year’s. This year, Jesse had to work Christmas Eve, so plans were rearranged to accommodate. Both Jesse and I decided to add to the fun by coming down with a seasonal cold just before leaving. So, I spent my Christmas Eve packing, wrapping presents, loading up the car, and running last-minute errands, singing Christmas tunes at the top of my sick little lungs while driving all over Wilmington to snag things I’d forgotten earlier in the week, still managing to sneak in for one of the Christmas Eve services at church in between the craziness for a nice hour to focus and chill out a bit.

(To the list of things I can’t do well while on cold medicine, add “carrying a tune.” Those Christmas songs have never been so mangled.)

Around 8:00 p.m., everything was done at last and we loaded the cats in their carriers, set them up in the backseat of the too-full car, and drove off—gulping down cold medicine, sucking on cough drops, and hoping what little energy we had wouldn’t give out too early. That morning, I’d plotted out our overnight stay options (there was no way we were making the drive overnight). I had a list of hotels that accepted pets at two-, three-, four-, and five-hour intervals. On our way out, I wanted to hit the McDonald’s drive-thru for some cheap coffee, but they were closed, of course. A cold Starbucks drink from a gas station had to do.

The good thing about driving late on Christmas Eve night is that no one else was crazy enough to be driving then. We had the roads to ourselves. We made remarkably good time. At three and a half hours in, I realized we were about a half hour away from the five-hour hotels. For a few minutes, I thought, well heck we could just keep on driving. But, I hadn’t plotted out many hotels after the five-hour mark, and I hate going door-to-door with hotels trying to find one that took cats, so we just planned on stopping when we got to one on our list. A few minutes after we decided this, I started to crash. Wait, no, not the car. Physically, speaking. My eyelids felt itchy and dry. My legs ached, and my feet tingled. When you’re sick, nights are the worst, and it just hit me all at once. We still had about twenty minutes to go. I counted every mile.

Finally, we saw our exit and pulled off the highway. I was just about cross-eyed while getting our keys, and I didn’t process a word the hotel clerk said to me. She could have told me the room cost $300 and check-out was at 5:30 a.m. and I would have just nodded and grunted my approval, shuffling out the door, plastic card-keys in hand.

I drove down to the end of the building to park near where I thought the hotel clerk had told me to go (though I couldn’t be sure), and as soon as we got out of the car, it started to rain so hard I felt like I’d been hit with a bucket of water. Like a high school coach whose team just won a big game. Bam! We frantically pulled the cats out of the car—along with a litter box, litter, and a couple plastic bags of overnight things—and ran to a pitiful little awning that barely covered the back door to the hotel’s hallway, struggling with our plastic keys and dripping cold rainwater, arms full and cats yowling their displeasure.

Inside, I set the cats up with a litter box and water. I had hunted for one of those one-time-use litter boxes, but hadn’t found one, so I’d bought the smallest, cheapest box Wal-Mart had. It would have to do.

I silently congratulated myself for getting us to the hotel in one piece and in such good time, attributing our expediency to the fact that I had driven seven miles an hour over the speed limit, rather than the four over Jesse typically drives. Feeling rather pleased with myself, I peeled off my wet clothes and took a hot shower. Ah, sweet relief. The night had been a little rough, but we’d made it. I could still breathe through my nose—quite the accomplishment—and I was warm and dry and had a fairly decent bed waiting for me. We turned out the lights, and I thought I’d pass out in about five minutes flat.

Well. I was wrong.

First of all, our upstairs neighbors were (I’m assuming from the noises they were making) very obese people performing interpretive dance. Or, they were jumping from the bed to the floor and back again. Or, they were running in circles. Or, a combination of all the above. I’ve heard some strange things in hotel rooms at night before, but nothing like this. It was entirely perplexing. I considered calling the front desk but was too exhausted to sit up and place the call. I kept hoping they’d quiet down. The cats, too, were disturbed by the noise and, curious about the hotel room, they spent the night roaming, jumping from the bed to the floor and back again themselves.

Soon, though, I realized the people—or animals?—upstairs were not the loudest or most annoying thing we’d deal with that night. Apparently, our room butted up against a flimsy fence, which separated the parking lot from a gas station. At which people in what sounded like monster trucks liked to congregate on Christmas Eve night…well, technically Christmas morning by now. They revved their trucks, they yelled at one another, they made all sorts of loud and obnoxious sounds. I believe you could say they were carousing. In the middle of the night. On Christmas. Next to our hotel room. When we really, really needed the sleep.

When we “woke up” the next morning (to wake up implies being asleep, and I’m not entirely sure we were), I felt worse than I had the day before. I was back to breathing out of my mouth, which gave me a constant look of the half-dead, or half-asleep, my mouth hanging open in a somewhat doleful manner. As we got ready to leave, Gracie jumped into the litter box and proceeded to pee on the floor. The poor thing—she really thought she was peeing in the box (she even turned around to “cover” it), but her aim was completely off. So, we cleaned up the pee and threw away the rest of the litter.

And then I did something that will forever make me cringe in hotel showers. I washed the litter box…in the shower. With the hotel shampoo. Gross, gross, gross. I know. But what else could I do? I was too cheap to leave the litter box there. I had paid five bucks for that thing. Which, to be fair, was probably the same price I would have paid for the disposable box. But still, there was the principle of the matter. This was a non-disposable box that I had paid for. So, the shower it was. I hoped the shower got cleaned between guests, but I feared it didn’t.

After a sad breakfast of off-brand hotel cereal, bad orange juice, and decongestants, we gassed up the car and got back on the road. Most of the drive was rainy and more crowded than the day before. But we were still making good time, even though Jesse was driving all of three miles an hour slower than I’d driven the night prior. At the Florida line, the sky cleared and the sun came out, and though I felt physically wretched, my spirits were high.

About an hour away from my parents’ house, where we planned to deposit the cats before leaving for Jesse’s parents’ place for a Bond-Seabolt Christmas dinner complete with my aunt in from California and my grandmother, we stopped at a rest area for a bathroom break. As we walked back to the car, I thought, I should look over the car, just to make sure nothing’s wrong. I sometimes think things like this because I’m paranoid. What if we blew a tire? What if something heinous were hanging off the back of our car? What if something crucial had come loose? I always check, mostly amused by my neuroses and happy to see that I worried for nothing, again.

Only this time, one of our rear tires was completely flat.

I thought about the air compressor my dad had given me for my car a few years back. Which I’d failed to pack in Jesse’s car. It was in my car, in my garage, at home. And the spare tire was in Jesse’s trunk. Under our luggage. Which was under a set of golf clubs. Which was under a mound of Christmas presents, my laptop and camera, pillows, a set of towels, a fresh set of clothes to change into that evening…

It all came out. Our belongings strewn on the sidewalk for people to look over as they gawked at us while walking their Pomeranians. Jesse, wearing an old t-shirt and ripped jeans because they were the only ones not packed in the big suitcase, changed the tire and threw the stuff back in the trunk. We crawled along I-95, afraid to blow the donut, and eventually showed up on my parents’ doorstep, my hair frizzy from the Florida humidity, Jesse’s hands dirty. Our mouths hanging half-open, we sniffed a congested “Merry Christmas” and collapsed on their couch. Sleep-deprived, sicker than we’d been before the trip, and bearing gifts with crumpled bows, we must have been a sight, but we hardly cared. We were finally, finally home.