Disastrous Holidays

Holidays – they can be adventure-filled, relaxing or plain disastrous. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay at home isn’t it?

I wrote earlier in the year of the misfortunate and so-called ‘summer’ vacation up at the bach which involved kids’ spew and cats’ poo. Well Labour weekend we didn’t have any of the latter – we left the cats at home. But the former? There was bucket-loads.

Actually I wished we’d had some buckets. They would’ve come in handy when one twin spewed all the way there, and the other twin spewed all the way home.

Our car reeked.

Mind you, we’ve had worse. A couple of years back we took our young family to Auckland. Everyone’s health was fine when we left but, all of a sudden, in the posh suburb of Ponsonby, I heard what I thought was water gushing. Believing the car to be overheating, I looked around for smoke. No smoke but the gushing continued with vigor until I was alerted to its origins from a protesting sibling who’d had the misfortune of being in its firing line.

We pulled over and stripped the car and kids on the upper-class sidewalk before continuing on with naked children in bare bucket seats.

The upheaval continued throughout the weekend until it was all the family, bar me with the stomach bug. My brother and sister-in-law - childless at the time - looked at the carnage we’d created in their home with thinly-disguised horror while their washing machine whirred in the background on an eternal cycle.

Finally we made the call to go home with me designated driver. It was the worst journey of my life.

Not only was it pitch-black, the other four occupants were barfing all the way home, calling for constant pull-overs on the side of the motorway. In the end there was nothing for it but to continue driving and the kids eventually fell asleep covered in vomit.

Back at home, it miraculously stopped. But it took a good two years before we were game enough (or felt welcome for that matter) to return to the Big Smoke.