Road Trip

My husband and I loved our pop-up camper. We went camping in it almost every weekend. Sometimes we lived at the campground for a couple of weeks, driving back and forth to work from the camper. The only problem was that it had no bathroom.

During an internet search for camping equipment, I happened to find an add for a toilet seat that attached to a five gallon bucket, turning the bucket into a makeshift potty. I was thrilled with the find. At last, I could use the bathroom in the middle of the night without having to go outside to the bathhouse and avoid things like bears, snakes, and spiders. The only problem was, someone had to empty the bucket.

Our normal routine was to place the bucket in the back of our pickup truck and stop at the dump station on our way out of the campground. This worked just fine for us. That little bucket setup made camping so much nicer for us.

About a year after we got the "boilet", the name we gave our contraption, we took a road trip from Georgia to south Texas. We stopped at a campground in Louisiana for the night. The next morning, we hooked up the camper trailer to the truck, put the bucket in the back of the pickup, and took off-without stopping at the dump station. We did not give it another thought.

When we arrived in Houston later that day, the traffic was horrible, and to make matters worse, our map was out of date. We missed our turn and wound up in downtown during rush hour. While trying to make a left turn, my husband had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting another vehicle. When he did, that potty bucket flew from the tailgate to the back windshield of the truck. The lid popped open and the contents of that bucket spewed out, all over our equipment in the back of the truck! Needless to say, we never forgot to empty the boilet again.