The quotes started the night before we left, when I said, "Ned needs a change!" and Jill replied, "That's why we're going to Maine!" The wit flowed from there. Among the best lines from the car:

-"We are never doing this again!" Jill said this, I don't know, eight thousand times between The Bronx and the gravel driveway of our bayside vacation house. For me, this trip was a pilgrimage home. But for Jill, it became a matter of twisting around in the passenger seat to comfort Ned when he started crying. She had particular trouble feeding him backwards and upside-down in the stop-and-go of I-95 outside Boston (leading to the Runner Up in our Best Quotes Contest: "You're not the smoothest braker in the world, Jeff!"). Good thing we didn't pack a divorce lawyer. -"Blahhchh!" Poor Alex, he almost made it. But on the twists and turns near Ellsworth, Maine, the motion, the sunlight, and the steady diet of crunchy crap that we'd handed him all afternoon brought forth first two coughs -- which caused Jill, who was driving, to swerve at breakneck, pre-vomit speed into the parking lot of a migrant workers' motel - followed by, well, the stream. <continued below>

The migrants watched wordlessly as we whipped through a clip of diaper wipies to get the stuff off the car seat and our luggage. Alex needed a total change. (Almost as total as the one he needed in a restaurant a few nights later, when, in the words of my friend, fellow dad and fellow vacationer Jon, we "lost containment" on a diaper and Alex wound up naked under the window of a meatloaf and pie eatery while Jill scrubbed with everything she could find. "From his arms! His arms!" she said later.) Anyway, in the middle of the clean-up outside the motel, one of the migrants asked me if I knew where the Wal-Mart was. Why? Was he going to buy us paper towels?

-"There's a roach on me!" Our vacation house was home to more than mosquitoes, it seems, and on the ride back Jill had just settled in the back seat -- the better to calm Ned -- when she let this one fly. I had killed an earwig near that very spot just an hour earlier, and you didn't hear me squawking about it.

-"Is this volume, an accident, or what?" I haven't done a lot of driving in the last several years, and my innocence evaporated approaching the clogged toll booths of the New Hampshire Turnpike. There we had 30-minute crawls to the privilege of spending one damned dollar to drive through to the Maine border. I would have paid 10 bucks to avoid the Turnpike altogether, but New England, unlike New York City, isn't built that way. I tried over and over to explain this to Jill, who looked at the other cars and just muttered, "I hate all these people." Incidentally, not until the return trip, outside New York City, did a jam pay off in an accident: a car spectacularly flipped over. I hope they didn't do it for our benefit.

-"Hang on, Kowolski!" Being rookies at car travel with kids, Jill and I tried to feed Ned while he sat strapped in his car seat, facing the rear window. The one of us in the passenger seat would get into a crouch, facing backwards, and maneuver the spoon and food into his mouth, which was just ever so slightly out of sight. Jill hated doing this.

When it came my turn, however, I snapped off my seatbelt and grabbed the strained carrots as if grabbing a first-aid kit, exclaiming, "Oh boy, it's like I'm in a bomber and I have to help a wounded crewman!" I leaned over Ned and cried, "Hang on, Kowolski!" You have to do this stuff on a long drive.

-"Moo-zik!" One of the surprise pleasures of the week with Jon and his wife Cindy was that they lent us a Jessica Harper CD. Soon Alex would accept no substitute for road tunes. Oldies stations, other CDs, his parents soothing tones ("There's a roach on me!") only set him wiggling in the car seat and firing requests for "Moo-zik! Moo-zik!" until we slid in Harper's "Rhythm in My Shoes."

Here's the weird part: When we got home, Alex continued requesting "moo-zik!" and was only satisfied with Harper's CD. But he wouldn't listen to it unless strapped into his booster seat. Alex seems to find the home combination of seat, straps, and music just as satisfying as a long car trip, which is good because, as I heard somewhere, we are never doing that again.