The Nightmare Trip from Hell

by Ellen Buckhorn

What is the definition of a nightmare? Something that strikes fear into your heart at the mere thought or mention of it? In that case, I submit the trip we took to visit my husband's family in Sweden when our daughter was 19 months old. So haunted were we by this trip that it took us two years before we dared take her farther than we could drive in four hours' time.

I think it was doomed from the start. Our initial plan had been to meet up with my husband's mother in London and have a real vacation. We'd spent all of our previous vacations catching up with family in Sweden and we were really looking forward to doing something different for a change. Unfortunately, his 80-year-old mother decided that she really wasn't up for the trip so we changed our plans and got cheap tickets from London to Sweden, cutting our trip to the UK down to just a weekend on our way back home.

We had visited the Swedish relatives when the baby was 11 months old and the trip had been a dream. She had slept on the plane, eaten everything, slept well in Sweden, it was easy. Eight months later she was a charming toddler, affectionate, bubbly, fun, and we were eager to show her off. She had the limited vocabulary of a one and a half year old but we felt that we usually knew what she meant and the words she did say were crystal clear. We made our way to the airport for our first flight of what would be twenty-four hours of traveling, and all the while she was sitting in the back in her car seat saying, "Home? Home?" We thought, oh how cute and clever she is, "No sweetie, we're going to visit Farmor! It's going to be so much fun!"

No, no, no, what she meant was, "Please take me back home, I have a stomach bug and I'm really not feeling well," but the only part of that she could say was "home." I had taken her to the pediatrician in a last-minute crush before we left for the airport because she had a bad cough. Her bad coughs always wound up turning into serious problems requiring a nebulizer and breathing treatments, none of which we could take with us. The doctor gave us a prescription for an infant's inhaler and we stocked up on over-the-counter cold remedies and hoped for the best. I was prepared for a cold you see, not a stomach bug.

We checked in and proceeded to our gate and the nightmare got underway. She was that child you see in the airport and think to yourself, please don't let that kid be on my flight. Even I was thinking that and I knew she would not only be on my flight but on my lap and my responsibility the whole eight hours. I tried to minimize the impact by telling people around us that I was letting her get it out of her system before the flight but I couldn't help but wonder what had possessed my normally happy child. On the plane she was not as bad as I had feared and she did sleep part of the time, but her behavior in the airport had rattled me and I was nervous. It didn't help when we had to circle Heathrow airport three times before being allowed to land. Once we were at the gate and allowed to get out of our seats, she threw up. All over herself. Ok, she has motion sickness. Sure, who wouldn't? I considered us lucky that she hadn't been on either of our laps and that we had a change of clothes for her. We had the whole day to kill in London and probably a little time outside in Hyde Park, fresh air, time on terra firma, and she'd be right back to her old self.

At first, that seemed like it would work out. But we had some lunch and shortly afterward, she threw up again and she started to feel feverish. We made our way back to Paddington Station and the first aid station there where a nurse took her temperature in a smoky room and tried to reassure us. I sensed that things were only going to get worse and even though we still had several hours before we needed to get across London to Stansted airport, I knew we had better get on our way. The Tube took us over to Liverpool Street Station where one can catch the train for Stansted.

When the trains are running, that is.

Earlier that day a train had stalled on the tracks out to the airport and they couldn't move it so they couldn't run any other trains on that line. I couldn't believe our luck. I was standing there with a sick toddler in a stroller, a big bag on my back, my husband next to me with a big bag on his back and a big rolling duffle bag behind him and no way to get to the airport. Then I spied a conductor talking to some people near us and I sidled over to hear what he was saying. I didn't catch it all but it seemed like they were going to try and get a train going. Meanwhile there were tons of people waiting because three trains had already been delayed because of this incident. If there was going to be a train, I was going to be on it. I had my husband wait over near the place where they were asking everyone to wait and I tailed the conductor, at a distance so he wouldn't tell me to bugger off, straining to hear every conversation he had with other employees. Finally I heard him get the ok, they had succeeded in moving the stuck train and would start boarding on platform 5. I looked at my husband and gave him a look that said, Move it! As he was half-way over to meet me, the announcement was made and people started running. I shouted to my husband, "I'm getting on!" and took off ahead of everybody. We did both make it on, with all our bags but it was crammed and hot and I was still worried that my feverish girl would start to throw up again.

You would think that getting to the airport would have been a relief and, seeing as how we were hours ahead of time, we could have relaxed. However, our travel day coincided with the day they set the clocks ahead for Daylight Savings Time in Europe and all the clocks at the airport were screwed up. That meant that none of the gate information was correct and no one, not even the airline staff, knew where we needed to be to check in. We waited in what was indicated as the right line for an hour, only to get within two people of the check-in desk and hear an announcement that we were in the wrong line. We ran to get in the new line. Ten minutes later they changed their minds and said we should go back to the line we we'd just left. Only now we had to get in the back of the line. Feverish toddler, stomach bug, no sleep, jet lag, travel hell.

Twenty four hours after we had left our house in New England, we finally arrived at my husband's mother's apartment in Sweden. Our daughter was sick with the stomach bug for the first two days of our visit and once she recovered from that, I think she finally realized that we weren't home. There were all these people she didn't know who wanted to hold her and hug her and, although my husband spoke Swedish to her exclusively, she was not used to being totally immersed in another language. She was not herself. She threw temper tantrums and hit us and hurled her food to the floor. Shocking behavior for our little girl who was normally very well behaved, especially around strangers. I just wanted the whole thing to be over but we still had a weekend in England to look forward to.

Our flight back to London was thankfully incident-free but we were really testing the limits of our daughter's patience with all of the transportation modes we used. By the time we got on the tube to switch train stations she had had it. Our bad luck was still in force and they were doing repairs on the line we would have used to take the shortest route so we had to take the Circle Line all the way around. As the doors shut on the subway car, she started screaming and straining to get out of the stroller. Well, there was no way I was going to let her out and try to wrestle with her while we had all these bags to hold onto and people squished up against us. So she howled, and people looked at us like we had kidnapped her and as if she were screaming for her life, "No! Get me out! Away from these people who are clearly not my parents! See how callous they are? Here I am screaming and crying and they aren't doing a thing to help me!" Yeah, nice try, kid.

Two trains later we arrived at Henley-on-Thames where we had booked two nights at a bed and breakfast within walking distance of the downtown. Lord knows what possessed us but the weather was gorgeous, a warm, sunny spring day, and we had had nothing but gray and chill and rain in Sweden. We felt the fresh air would do us good, so we walked. It was uphill nearly all the way and we had to wear our coats because we had our hands full with all the bags and the stroller. We checked in to the B&B, sweaty, exhausted and hungry. It didn't help my mood to learn that the weather that whole week had been glorious, the week we were originally supposed to be spending in London instead of Sweden, but that it was supposed to be gray and chilly starting the next day. I was determined to be out in the sunshine for at least one damn day of this miserable vacation so we cleaned up and went back into town.

As every parent knows, there's only so much time a toddler, or any child really, will tolerate sitting still. Ours decided that dinner in the restaurant was precisely the moment when she had had enough. Dinner spoiled, my husband valiantly took her back to the B&B so I could sit and finish my dinner in peace and quiet for a few minutes.

The next day we went managed to do a few things we had been planning to do but we also needed to find a pharmacy. We had run out of cold medicine for her and her cough was keeping her--and us--awake nights. There didn't seem to be a pharmacy open on a Sunday in town so, just before it was closing, we ran into a grocery store. We bought a children's cough suppressant and picked up a pizza to take back to the B&B with us for dinner, as we didn't dare chance another meal in a restaurant. As we walked along, with our daughter between us holding our hands, we did that game where you swing the child between you on the count of three. Kids love this and she was happy and saying, "Again! Again!" For a brief moment we were all happy.

Then, abruptly, she yelped out in pain. I guess her hand had slipped a little in my husband's and he had grabbed on too tightly to her wrist to keep from losing grip. We put her in the stroller so we could hurry back and she started crying and saying it hurt. We got back to our room, where she started shrieking again when we tried to get her coat off. I was trying to console her and look to see if she was seriously hurt when she suddenly started crying, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" in the most heart-wrenching tone, as if the whole thing had been her fault, the whole miserable trip. It was more than my husband could take and he went into the bathroom and broke down crying himself.

That night we went to bed and I sighed to myself and thought, well, that has to be it. That has to be the end of this. We're leaving in the morning, nothing else can go wrong now.

Yeah, famous last words...

With a final evil twist of the knife that fate had jammed into my side, our daughter woke up screaming in the middle of the night. She wasn't in pain from her wrist, she was having a night terror. It was eerie. Her eyes were open but she was very obviously not awake. Nothing we said got through to her, no holding or comforting made an impact. She just screamed bloody murder at the top of her lungs for twenty minutes at 2am in a bed and breakfast that was fully booked.

We didn't dare push our luck so we paid for a taxi to take us to the airport in the morning, sacrificing the return train tickets we had already bought. The sun was shining again and we were headed home and I was relieved to have survived the trip from hell. As we made our way back to our car from the airport terminal, our daughter must have recognized the bright yellow walls that had been put up to hide some construction and she gleefully shouted, "Home! Home! Home!" just like Dorothy does at the end of The Wizard of Oz when she wakes up and realizes she's back on the farm in Kansas. My husband and I looked at each other, expressionless, too worn out from our "vacation" to even acknowledge the irony of the moment. We drove home in a snowstorm, in April, and my husband declared it the worst vacation of his entire life. It certainly was a nightmare I hope I never have again.