This experience will probably be broken up into several pieces, so as not to overwhelm readers with too many catastrophes experiences at once.

When I was offered the chance to take my whole family on a press trip to Wisconsin Dells, I jumped. I’ve been to “The Dells” a few times, if by “The Dells” you mean 500 yards from the exit at one of the hotel-slash-indoor waterparks where my family celebrated the Christmas holidays several years in a row because it was reasonably central and gave us a place where all the (plentiful) kids in the family could splash around in heated pools in a balmy room…in January, in the Midwest. But in all those trips, I never saw the actual Dells:

(maybe because it was, you know, the middle of winter?)

We also never ventured into the tourist area downtown or the restaurants. And since I grew up in a tourist trappy kind of town, I have a special affinity for them in my heart. But we found that while Wisconsin Dells has its share of trinket shops and cheesy motels, it’s also got some very cool attractions that make it more than worth the three-hour trip from Chicago.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Before I can tell about our trip to Wisconsin Dells, I have to tell you about getting out of town. And that part turned out to be a little more complicated than I hoped it would.

First of all, we were blessed with a flat tire a few days before the trip (I say “blessed” because I’m in one of those Zen moods where I’m trying to see everything as a gift from the universe. And in a way, it was a blessing, because not having the van available forced me to figure out how to navigate the Metra system.) For a few days we deliberated on how to get our car to the Discount Tire about 20 miles away, where our tires are under warranty. We settled, finally, on a pricey tow with the promise that our vehicle would be ready by early Friday morning.

After dropping the big boys off at school on Friday morning (the morning of the trip) Jon and I squeezed the two little guys into his teeny-tiny car and headed for the burbs. Of course, we were leaving at 9 AM, and as it turns out, there are a lot of people on Chicago’s main roads at 9 AM. (duh.) It took us about an hour to get there, and after a cranky exchange in the car, Jon headed off for his day at work and the kids and I started our journey back to Chicago in the minivan.

Only…something wasn’t right. The brakes seemed soft, squishy. I turned around and went back to the Discount Tire, where we discovered…

A huge puddle of our brake fluid.

Needless to say, the rest of our morning involved arranging for a rental car and figuring out what we were going to do with the van, which, thank goodness, turned out to simply have a loose hose). With our schedule in turmoil, instead of getting on the road at 3:15 sharp like we’d hoped, we left at 4:45.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly when everybody in Chicago is getting on the road on the Friday before Mother’s Day. And apparently, they were all headed to the exact same place as us. It took us for-freaking-ever to get there, and at some point I gave up on “good parenting” and spent my time chucking candy and cookies into the backseat to keep everybody quiet.

And that’s something I would live to regret hours later, when some of those cookies and candy wound up, regurgitated, in my lap.

(to be continued…)