Lucky Bathroom Breaks: Alligators and Car Sick Stops

We said goodbye to the beach house on Saturday morning and then started on the drive home. Though we had planned a pit stop at the military museum on the way out to Florida, we had no planned stop for the way home. We were just going to more or less drive straight through, stopping only when necessary. We determined we'd eat our lunch at...some random gas station along the way. 

And some random gas station it was!

We had only recently stopped for someone to use the restroom when Zoë announced that she needed to make another stop. Fortunately we weren't out in the boonies (our older kids are a bit better about timing potty announcements, waiting until they're pretty sure we can stop to ask to use the bathroom) and we soon pulled over at yet another gas station. 

Their attached convenience store was called "Gator Stop" and was filled with all sorts of gator goods. They had stuffed gators on display (real ones) and stuffed gators available for purchase (cute, fake ones) and t-shirts and water bottles and all sorts of things. We soon found out why—they have a 9-acre pond on their property that is teeming with alligators.

We brought out our lunch to eat at the picnic tables under the shade while we watched the alligators—and other things like various herons (a little blue heron and a great blue heron) and a spotted gar. People were tossing things like hot dogs into the water...it was wild!

This particular alligator was quite large:

This one was quite a bit smaller (though I'm not sure that you can really tell that from either picture):

 

Here's Phoebe saying something about how it's just a little alligator (and I'm pretty sure she got a /g/ sound in there...so that's progress):

It was a lovely place to stretch our legs and eat our lunch! It was about the halfway point between Panama City Beach and Atlanta. With only three hours left in our trip, you'd think we'd be good on bathroom breaks, but I believe we'd take two more. I know for sure that we took one right before entering Atlanta and all of its wild traffic. 

It was Phoebe who needed to go potty this time. And she needed to go desperately. 

She was just about wailing by the time we pulled up, so we hurriedly unbuckled her and Andrew started marching her inside (since he needed to go potty as well). Just as they were about to step on the sidewalk...Phoebe lost her lunch all over the place. She and Andrew were both covered in vomit and there was a lovely little puddle of vomit on the asphalt. 

I pulled out an extra outfit for Phoebe and we got her cleaned up and changed and really we felt rather glad that we were so close to home. She cried and begged for snacks, but we made her wait until we got all the way home to try eating anything else. We didn't know if she was car sick or sick-sick...but it turns out she was just car sick (thank goodness). 

Last year she threw up inside a gas station while waiting for the toilet. 

And the year before that was our infamous stomach-virus-a-the-beach year.

So the fact that we only had one person throw up outside felt like some pretty good progress on our part. We really couldn't have time that bathroom break better.