If there’s anything I love more than tales of family misadventures on the road, then I just don’t know what it is.

So when I got my review copy of How to Fit a Car Seat on a Camel, I bumped it straight to the top of my reading pile and devoured it in a single sitting.

It’s a great collection of stories that were probably not so funny when they happened: kids who disrespect the King at Graceland, a woman who sprays a sniffy flight attendant with breast milk, a family who backtracks 10 miles to pick up their son’s imaginary friend.

Julia Litton’s sublime “Consider Atlanta” alone is worth the price of the book.

In it, a young family tries to travel from Minneapolis to Dulles the day before Thanksgiving, and is re-routed to Detroit due to an unspecified mechanical failure.  Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite.

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From the child-free perspective, air travel with anyone under the age of twenty-one looks masochistic under the best of circumstances. Add to this the pressures of flying during the holidays, what with the potential for foul winter weather and overbooked flights and five hundred million families just like yours all trying to go in opposite directions . . .

“No way,” I remember saying. “We will resist. We will blaze new paths and forge new traditions. We will restrict our travel to balmy months like May and September and we will only fly on Tuesday afternoons. We will not bring everything we own to entertain a five-month-old baby on a ninety-minute flight. We will not distract the busy steward (who is, after all, just there for our safety) with instructions on how to microwave the child’s soy milk for exactly 33 seconds at 75 percent power because he only will drink it hot but not too hot. And, most importantly, we will most emphatically not travelfor Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Flag Day, Jurgi, Michaelmas, or Towel Day.” Thus spoke the prechild me.

Steve and I now have one son, Patrick, and he has spent every major holiday since his birth in 2002 lovingly surrounded by extended family despite the fact that we live at least eight hundred miles from our nearest relatives. How did this happen, you wonder? We schlepped him to them. What about my vow, you ask?

“Just tell them,” I would hiss at my husband as he picked up the phone to discuss another upcoming holiday with his family. “Just say it. Say we’ll see them the following week. Say we’ll come the month before. Be strong. Offer a tempting selection of alternate dates. Just . . .”

“Dad!” my husband would say. “So, um, we were thinking about maybe not flying in for Thanksg- Oh. Oh, sure. Of course. Right! Of course! Great! We’re looking forward to it! See you then!”

Five seconds into the call and his father would clear his throat or something, at which moment my husband would fold like an origami crane. Every. Single. Time. And then there we would be again, buying airline tickets with a seasonal markup best calculated by NASA and realizing that there is a very good reason why people travel by the millions on those busy dates: ancestral guilt. Not that I was any better with my side of the family. I never even managed to get past the word “um” before my mother had me promising that we would consider looking at houses for sale in her area during our Christmas visit, a visit, she was certain, that we would not mind extending to a full week this year.

From the essay “Consider Atlanta” by Julia Litton, part of the anthology How to Fit a Car Seat on a Camel (Seal Press). Copyright © 2008.

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If—like me—you just can’t get enough of Julia Litton, you can find her blogging at REDBOOK’s The Mom Moment and on her personal blog, Here Be Hippogriffs.

Our review copy of this book is up for grabs people!  Leave a comment here by midnight Friday, and we’ll select a lucky winner at random.  U.S. only please.

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