A Holiday Travel Story…

Our holiday adventure was getting to Cincinnati for Christmas. The rest of my family traveling from Utah, Connecticut, and North Carolina also had crazy travel stories this year, but this was ours… and our trip should have been the easiest! It should take 1 ½ hours to get to Cincinnati from Louisville. This time it took 9!

It was the Tuesday before Christmas. We packed up the van (completely full with luggage and Christmas) and were off to Cincinnati at 4:30pm with four children and my mother. It was already starting to sleet and we figured that the roads would be a little icy. The highway was busy and it was a little slow going but the problems didn’t start until we reached our half way point about 50 miles from Cincinnati. As soon as it got dark, the roads froze and cars were sliding off everywhere. Dad was driving a few miles ahead of us on the same highway and would call to tell us where the slick spots were… which ended up being everywhere. The roads were nothing but a sheet of ice.

We reached “mile marker 59.” And that’s where we stopped. We were in miles of backed up traffic. Although there were many cars off the road, we never determined that there was one particular accident that we were stopped for. The only news we could gather was that police stopped traffic because of the icy roads. We didn’t move a single inch for 4 hours. Fortunately we had enough gas to run the car and keep warm, but most of the cars around us simply turned off their engines and lights. And there we sat on I-71 North at mile marker 59, in dark, rural northern Kentucky.

In our hurry to pack and get out the door, we put most of the food in Dad’s car – although we did have water bottles. We thought we would be to Cincinnati by dinner. At hour four when the kids were starting to get hungry, mom looked around to see what she could find. We had an onion, green bell pepper and some iceberg lettuce. Mom miraculously made a few pretzels appear which she distributed to our hungry children. I’m not sure if they were left over from her flight to Louisville or from the floor of my van, but we were grateful. And then… mom remembered that we had a HUGE container of Costco cream puffs. So we all ate cream puffs and the kids thought Christmas had come early. (I’ve held a personal grudge against cream puffs for the last 9 years since my sister Jenny’s baby shower when I volunteered to make cream puffs that were supposed to look like swans. They didn’t look like swans, and I was frustrated and crying at 4am determined that Jenny would have swan cream puffs at her baby shower. James finally talked me out of it and they were just your normal cream puffs. Everyone loved them and didn’t know the difference. When I came to my senses the next day I recognized a valuable lesson which I always refer to as “Don’t cry over swan cream puffs.” But…I have refused to make them ever since. However, due to the sustenance they provided on this trip, cream puffs have redeemed themselves in my eyes – and I am determined to try them again this year.)

We still had our sense of humor until hour 6, and even taught the kids the words to The Twelve Days of Christmas. There was talk of being one with the road and feeling a close personal connection with that stretch of highway. People around us were periodically out of their cars… walking their dogs, sharing cell phones, and running off into the woods. The last three hours we weren’t making any jokes. Traffic eventually started moving again at a 5 mile per hour crawl. We had 48 miles to go and it seemed like an impossible distance. Thank goodness for a portable DVD player and Seasons 1 and 2 of The Cosby Show! The kids fell asleep sometime after 11:00pm. The rest of the story involved hours of slow bumper to bumper traffic, pouring rain, a smoke filled truck stop, stress headaches, and cell phone calls. We were also very worried about dad, whose car broke down a few miles ahead of us. He pushed his car off to the side of the road and out of the stopped traffic. A few hours later we reached him and he climbed into our already packed car.

It was all extremely stressful, but James got us to Cincinnati safely. We pulled into the Mizukawa’s driveway at 1:30am - 9 hours after we left Louisville. We were mentally and physically exhausted. Five year old Annie woke up in her car seat, looked around and summed it all up for us… “Darn it. That was a horrible drive.”