Defeated by a highway

It’s only 12pm in Sacramento, but it’s 3pm our time and we’ve been up a long time.  We finally grabbed some food for us and got some of the drive done with Oscar sleeping.  I wanted to stop for olives though and screwed up by getting out ungracefully from a car that I’m not used to driving.  So, he wouldn’t go back to sleep and John and I have made the asinine decision to take a road that nearly killed us

when we first moved to California.  Like it does often, the 101 is out going north to Eureka, so we’re facing 36 across or 299.  When we moved here,  we took 299 out and it seemed to take forever.  So, when we returned our u-haul to Chico in 2005, we decided that 36 looked like a short cut home.  On that drive, we passed a forest fire that came to the road, herds of deer that just loitered in the road, a flat tire (probably because our tire melted) and then came down into a Redwood forest in the middle of the night.  This was our first encounter with Redwoods and they scare the shit out of you when they are looming in your headlights  without warning.  I had my first panic attack on this drive and it has reached mythical proportions in our memories.  So, when we realized that we were going to have to go west

off I-5, John and I both immediately wanted to redrive it.  Within the first 10 miles, we had to pull over and get the Bonine out of the trunk for us to take.  We twisted and turned and passed mountains, hills and felt that they had repaved, that it was so much better in the daylight, and wasn’t this not so bad?  We stopped and threw rocks down toward the Van Duzen river which had some rapids going on 

 miles below us.  We were 3000 ft up in the air and Oscar is learning new words like “mountain” when it all goes horribly and predictably awry.  Oscar has had some moments on the drive where he seems to be unhappy, then he gets better and it’s okay.  Then he coughs and I say to John, “do you remember when we were on the cruise ship and his cough was the warning that he was about to throw up?”  And that’s exactly what happened.  The poor kid was trying to tell us that something was wrong by asking mommy    to come into the back seat with him, but we weren’t really 

listening to the kid.  The projectile vomiting at least happened all over doggie and himself and the car seat.  It was exactly like on the boat and I think that we can now say with authority that was presaged by motion sickness as was this.   We were able to pull over, get him undressed, out and cleaned up with rall the vomit covered parts in a bag in the trunk.  We walked around and I had the brilliant idea of putting John in the backseat with 

Oscar with a bag in case this happened again.  We are now only 60 miles from the end of this road and salvation, but that’s still too long.  Even with two meclizine in him, John ends up telling me to pull over and throwing up also.  So, I’m laughing hysterically while John throws up over a guardrail and we try to decipher our toddler’s limited vocabulary to see if he is going to throw up again.  I tell John to get in

the front seat because he doesn’t think that he’s well enough to drive.  And this road won’t end.  We keep stopping every 10 miles to try to let everyone’s stomach settle, and then we hit the redwoods and even more twisting and turning that is hairpin in nature.  We have to get to Eureka, you can’t stop on this road, there’s nothing there.  It’s iffy every time we pull over to throw rocks because there aren’t

 even real turn outs on this road.  We’re stopping in brake check plots of land.  That there are plots of land for brake checks tells you about the road.  We finally make it to the 101 and this highway has beaten us again.  We are all drained and exhausted in a way that we weren’t after travelling across the country.  We promised Oscar that if he could just make it the last 10 miles to Kim and James’ house, we wouldn’t get back in the car for 2 days.