This was the trip in which we discovered that our son was motion sick. A road trip wasn't the ideal trip to make such a discovery. But we somehow managed to salvage a lot out of this trip.
We woke up early (5am) and headed to Long Beach to catch a 7:30am flight to Boston. The flight was uneventful. We reached Boston at 4pm and spent the night at Manoj's cousin's place in Westwood (which was about an hour+ drive from the airport in the Friday evening traffic).
Today was supposed to mirror the museum days in Chicago. We were planning to spend the day at the Museum of Fine Arts. Everything went according to plan till our drive back to Westwood. On the way back we lost our way in the maze of Boston traffic and the frequent twists and turns made in search of the elusive freeway activated Pranav's motion sickness. He threw up once (thankfully close to the freeway entrance) and we cleaned him up at a Petrol station and he promptly went to sleep. We reached home before he woke up.
At this age, Pranav used to take two naps in a day. We took advantage of the first to reach Isabella Gardiner Museum in Boston from Westwood and the second to reach Portland, Maine (where we had planned to spend the night). Pranav enjoyed the curious collection at the museum and we could manage to go through the whole day without any incidents.
Early in the morning we drove towards Acadia National Park. Just before the exit, we stopped by a rest stop to feed Pranav. With half hour of drive from there, Pranav threw up his breakfast. He went to sleep after the clean-up. At the Sandy Beach point (about half way on the loop), he woke up. We fed him his next meal and gave an hour for his tummy to settle down and started to complete the loop. That didn't help and Pranav puked again. After that we just made a beeline to our hotel at Bar Harbour without any more stops. We didn't feed him anything till an hour after we returned. We gave him liquid food after that and he soon recovered his health. Both of us suffer from motion sickness and seeing the signs we were pretty sure that this was motion sickness and not any tummy infection. Now the trip had to be changed to accommodate the new challenge.
Our plan to combat the motion sickness was to only drive when Pranav was close to sleeping. We woke him up early in the morning to increase the chances of sleeping during the day. We gave him his breakfast and waited for a couple of hours before driving. He went sleep as soon as we started driving and didn't wake up till an hour and a half later. We stopped for breakfast soon after. We picked a restaurant with a view and spent a good 2.5 hours there. That ensured he slept again as we started driving. We drive till the Rangeley lakes before stopping. We spent a good 3 hours there before the same drive-with-a-sleeping-baby strategy till Bethel, our destination for the day.
The same strategy was followed this day as well. In the hour and a half sleep time in the morning, we drove till the foot of Mt. Washington. That was a fantastic place to have a picnic and we spent about 3 hours there. We shelved our plans of driving up Mt. Washington. In the afternoon nap time, we drove on the Kancamagus highway and reached Lincoln (our night stop) by the time Pranav woke up.
Pranav woke up very early today. After some futile attempts to put him to sleep, we gave up and left our hotel by 6am. He went back to sleep as soon as we started driving. We reached the start of VT100 by the time he woke up. After spending the customary 2 hours at the rest stop, we drove on VT100 close to Pranav's next sleep time. It was raining all along the weather started clearing a bit. Our next rest stop to spend the 3 hours was at Hancock. After letting Pranav drain his energy out there we drove incident free with a sleeping baby till Rutland, out final stop for the day.
The last driving day was short. We had to drive about 2 to 3 hours on the Mohawk trail to get back our destination in Westwood. We could negotiate that incident free to bring our driving part of the trip to a close.
On our final day we left Pranav at Manoj's cousin's place and checked out a few more sites at Downtown Boston. Well, without a kid, it was a breeze!
Today, we flew back incident free to Long Beach. For some reason, plane ride did not trigger Pranav's motion sickness. Maybe his senses aren't developed enough to sense motion on a flight.
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