Although we are leaving in exactly 7 days, we still didn’t decide on our trip itinerary. Of course we thought about some options, like doing an East- to West-coast trip, or driving from South-East Canada along the Western coast of the US. Then again, we also would like to drive to New York and go up North from there on.

Even though we didn’t plan stuff yet, in my head I already imagined these trips like the ultimate road trip experience; just driving around in a car (or maybe even a camper), stopping every now and then in places that seem cool, and stay at camping sites or AirBnB’s. This kind of trip involves a lot of driving, but hey, I passed my license a few weeks ago for a reason.

Now, we don’t have a car here in Holland, so we only took car rides with our daughter Lucie a few times. That is until recently, because moving out of our current place involved borrowing my parents car and doing a few car trips. This is when we made an unpleasant discovery.

On one of our first moving trips, after only 10 minutes in the car, Lucie’s lunch that she had had an hour before came out. The poor thing had been crying those 10 minutes before, and now it was clear why (although we could have guessed by green color her face had turned).

Unfortunately it was not a one-time thing. She vomited 4 out of the 5 car trips we did recently (yes, I kept count), starting on average after 12 minutes of driving. Now just saying to her: “we are going to take the car now”, is enough to make her start crying hysterically.

Motion sickness. Great. Doing on average 2 or 3 hours of driving a day (with sometimes even longer drives) for half a year doesn’t really sound like the best idea now. My envision of driving in our camper on Route 66 while listening to some nice country music doesn’t go very well with the smell of vomit in the background.

Luckily we didn’t book anything yet, and we are staying at our family’s in Montreal the first part of our trip, so we have some time to figure out some alternatives like taking trains or taking some continental flights.

I guess that’s the first lesson for our trip; be flexible and don’t force things if they are not gonna work. Maybe we won’t have the road trip experience as I imagined, but I’m sure we can figure some other way to make this an amazing trip. I will keep you updated on our travel plans.