Our Twelve Days of Christmas included 8 days of frenetic "oblication" (the marriage of obligatory family visits with the misnomer vacation), and nose plugs: we all have emissions issues, be it the flow of scented verbage between lips, or the passage of disturbage between hips, but no one wants to be trapped in a hurtling, (and therefore inescapable) airtight capsule when foul winds begin to blow. 2005-01-04
4 days of traveling 1500+ miles in a gift-and toddler-crammed, not-so-new Beetle.
Seriously, have any of you tried this?
I recommend plugs. For the car portion of the trip, that is. When it comes to dealing with extended family, it's probably best to approach kin orifice-corkage free.
ear plugs: to cancel road noise, kid noise, and the sickening sound of an entire bag of pretzels klutz-dumped in a spectacularly salty cascade from hands to lap to floor. Yes, the very same bag that prompted me to declare, "let mommy hold the pretzels, sweetie, because you might drop them, and then they'll be all (crackle slip splatter) gone!"
Waft.
LINGER.
Imagine, if you will, the olfactory bouquet of souring yogurt puke and seeping diaper sludge. Yeah. Top that off with a stay in a crap motel reeking of mothballs ---
he: "...but Triple A gave this place two stars!"
me: "...um, two stars out of how many? Two stars is not good, you know. Did you think two stars was a good thing? No more two stars. Seriously...two?"
---the stench was so strong, we actually piled back in the yopuke mobile and drove to a local drugstore to buy "air sanitzer". There were no neutral offerings, so I settled for lemon OUST.
Unfortunately, Eau de Mothball Limone turned out to be only slightly better than Eau de Mothball Originale.
Yeah, next year I'm packin' plugs.