Posted: September 21st, 2009 - 11:01pm by Ben Chapman

Last Friday the family and I embarked on a journey from Raleigh, NC to Port Hope, ON (Canada) to visit with our folks and celebrate our son Jack's 1st birthday. Dani and I had a strategy to limit the potential baby-craziness aspect of the 14-hour trip: leave mid-day and drive late into the night to perhaps let Jack's internal schedule take over and allow him to sleep for the majority of the ride.

Surprisingly, that plan worked perfectly.

Jack fell asleep around 7pm and did not wake until Dani abruptly woke him up with some spectacular barfing somewhere around Scranton, PA. She had been feeling car sick since about 30 minutes after we left and had fought it for a few hours, in her words, it "just came up". It surprised her enough that she felt she didn't have time to roll down the window, or even open the door. Sitting in the passenger seat, she turned to her left and decided to try to catch the barf in an empty cup she had sitting in the console. Bad idea. She filled the cup, and then both cup holders on the console. And then all over my leg and shoes.

Reminiscent of Lardass Hogan (see Stand By Me clip, below) I had a sympathy puke.

This ranks pretty high in my all-time vomit memories. It's up there with puking in Doug's flower bed; trying to catch vomit in my hands while sitting in a car and throwing it out the window (didn't work); deep-sea fishing induced illness and another Dani car story where she opened the window but decided to puke on the inside of the door instead. The most recent has made the top-5.

Jack fell back asleep soon after we stopped to clean up. But the car still smells like barf.