That time we lost on our kids

I can think of about a million things that are terrifying to parents. Typically my brain limits my imagination to relatively low grade terrifying things. Like what if I had to watch Cocomelon for 24 hours straight with my girls. Or my kid waking up at 16 years old and telling me they want to be a Georgia Bulldog. This is the extent of the bad things that I let my mind wander off to. I don’t really think about the truly awful things that can happen because I fear if I did, I would be sucked deep into a wormhole of catastrophic thinking.

Just outside of our rental was this large field. Lots of ground to cover if you’re sprinting back and forth (more on that below).

During our roadtrip last year something awful and terrible *did* actually happen: we lost our kids for about 15 minutes.

So you’re thinking to yourself “15 minutes? that ain’t bad”. And I would normally agree; 15 minutes, in the grand scheme of things is a grain of sand in the ocean of time. It’s nothing. And for people who are not really much for helicopter parenting, we’ve gone much much longer without knowing the exact whereabouts of our children. But we’ve always had a general sense of where they were. Maybe they were at the neighbor’s house. Or up in their room. Or hiding in the backyard. Each of these times our collective parental radar had a few blimps on the screen. We could find the girls with relative ease.

Except that one time. We were at the approximate mid point of our 4 month road trip. We had just spent a glorious month in San Luis Obispo and were beginning a jog through Southern Utah that would take us to all 5 national parks in the state over the course of a week. It was gonna be a demanding part of the trip so we were eager to get into our Airbnb in Springdale, just outside the main entrance to Zion National Park. We had rented a duplex in a large development of townhomes and other duplexes about 200 yards from the main drag leading into Zion. It was convenient with a few bars and restaurants near us, a grocery store, and a lot of random cars coming and going. It was busy but not overwhelming.

When we arrived, we immediately started to unload the car. Given that we had transported our fine ass Subaru Forrester stuffed to the brim with bikes, clothes, and cooking utensils all over the Western US, we had become pretty skilled at unloading. I handled unloading the car. Megan handled unpacking. We were a well oiled machine. And this instance was no difference. We parked the girls near a large rock bed and gave them a bucket and started to unload the car.

After 10 or 15 minutes of unpacking and f’ing around with my mortal enemy, the Thule, I noticed an eerie quiet. The girls had been throwing rocks, or filling up a bucket full of rocks, or putting rocks in the air conditioner (kids and rocks amiright) all within ear shot of me. But I could no longer hear them.

Lily ready to hike (or go dancing?) in Zion National Park

I went inside and asked Megan if she knew where the girls were. “No, aren’t they with you?”

“Not really. I mean they were outside but I wasn’t really paying attention to them?”

At this point the hairs start to stand up a bit on the back of our necks. This general sense of “oh shit, where are they”. Our collective parental radar was empty. We saw no bogies on the screen.

We went outside and started to casually look for them. Surely they’ll turn up. We circled the duplex. Nothing. At this point our casual strides became a little more hurried. We still had no idea where they were. We were maybe into 5 minutes of looking.

I decided to go one way and Megan the other. We were shouting their names. The worst possible thoughts were going through my head. Maybe a van had pulled over and bribed them to climb in? I was doing my best to remain calm and keep the really tragic shit from crowding my vision. I knew that in all likelihood the girls were somewhere nearby. But at this point, we’d been looking for the girls for about 15 minutes and they’d been out of sight for at least 20.

As I started to run towards the road to see if they’d maybe wandered out there, my mind raced back to the duplex we were staying. When we had arrived, the duplex next door to us was being cleaned. When the cleaners left, I remembered that they accidentally left the sliding glass door open. Maybe the girls were in there?

I turned to race back to the house, about 100 yards or so. I ran that 100 yards about as fast as Usain Bolt does and given that I’m not exactly a small dude, I probably generated a sonic boom in my wake. I got to the neighboring house and the sliding glass door was still open. As soon as I crossed in, I could hear the girls upstairs. I immediately went out to find Megan and called her over. Her gait was more of a Florence Griffith Joyner look, all elegance and speed. We both went into the other duplex and found the girls playing “house” upstairs. Lily had tucked Nora into the bed. They had used the towels for a variety of activities. The newly cleaned house had a mildly ransacked look to it. But the girls were safe and very happy (until they saw our tears and mania. then they started to cry and loser their minds too). The entire time we thought they were gone, they were just in the neighboring house unaware it wasn’t ours.

We went on to have an amazing trip in Zion National Park. We biked and we hiked and we climbed and we played in the water and it was one of our favorite parks to visit. But few things stand out in my mind quite like how we introduced ourselves to Springdale. From now on, we will always makes sure the duplex next to us is locked up real right.

For more on our trip to Zion, things to see, why you should ebike as much as you can there, and how not to lose your kids, head over to my Zion National Park write up.