The Perils of Road Trips

I'm going to go ahead and start this post with a TMI warning. I'll spare you all the details of the matter, but it will still be too much for some. So there's your warning.

Road trips are a many splendored thing. Sometimes. Back when I was originally in college road trips were the bomb. Heading out on the open road with your besties blaring the best hits of the 80s, 90s, and today. Dance parties in the car. Good times. However, the older I get, the less appealing they become. It doesn't help that Hubby is the worst road trip buddy ever. If he's not driving, he's asleep which makes driving very boring. But I'm not here to talk about that.

I've been on 4 road trips with Hubby now. The first one was by far the worst. We were driving to South Carolina for our first Thanksgiving together. This would be the first time I was meeting his family. He insisted on leaving at 3 am. At the time I was still working the normal day shift and not going to school so this was a terrible idea for me and here's why...the early hour of departure led me to be very sleep deprived which led me to drink either coffee or pop or both to stay awake which gave my stomach some problems which was already in a knot thanks to the nerves over meeting his family. What does this all add up to? PirateGeek barfing in a Waffle House parking lot in the middle of Kentucky at about 5 am. Good times. Road trips since have never been quite that bad, but they've never been an altogether awesome experience either.

Almost all of our road trips involve me being sleep deprived. This most recent one involved us leaving at 8 am after working all night and I didn't get much sleep the day before either. Good times. For me, sleep deprivation + road trip + the inevitable consumption of junk food = digestive system going into overdrive.

This is the TMI section of the post.

The digestive pyrotechnics lead to what I refer to as Mud Butt Syndrome. I won't go into specifics, but I will specify that it involves way too much wiping of the rear end. Normally this would just be annoying, but think about the kind of places you stop to poo on the road: nasty gas stations, restaurants, and rest areas. Your best shot at a nice restroom is at the rest area, but no matter how nice the restrooms may be, you can ALWAYS depend on encountering the same kind of toilet paper. You know it. It's the thinnest sand paper you will ever discover. It's simultaneously the most delicate stuff as far as falling apart at the slightest touch while also being the rough consistency of sand paper. This means that you're using half of the giant cheese wheel roll in one sitting because if you don't get at least 25 layers of it, your hand will go right through it. At the same time, this delicate ghost of toilet paper is also giving your ass the sandblaster treatment. If the MBS is particularly bad, like it was on this trip, you'll walk out of the restroom feeling like you've been sitting on a chainsaw. After the extensive awfulness of this particular bout with MBS, I decided to be prepared for the trip back. I bought some of those Cottonelle wet wipes, and had meant to steal a roll of real toilet paper from the in-laws, but thanks be to God, I never went poo on the way home. I will be prepared for the next time, though.

Thus concludes the TMI portion of the post.

So there's my little bit of advice for those of you that suffer from MBS. And now you can know that you're not alone in the world.