I am having a hard time describing the rooms we visited this past weekend as anything remotely resembling a “restroom” or “restful” but here goes.

Our kids participated in a beach competition and as such, there were beach bathrooms to be used as change rooms, with bathroom-esque facilities.

By noon, the line-up outside the Ladies Room (though I’m having a really hard time calling anyone who could have done that to a room a “Lady”) had a line-up about ¾ of a km long with pregnant women, babies crying, women delivering babies, women with young sons, people giving tattoos and piercings to friends, someone getting a home perm, you get the idea. The line-up was LONG.

The sun was angry that day my friends. It felt like 40 degrees and I’m not complaining because the alternative could have been -40 or rain. Let’s assume though, for the 12 hours we were on the beach, it felt about the same way you might feel trapped in a car with the heat on with the windows up and someone occasionally pouring hot water over rocks to really steam it up.

The smell emanating from the “Ladies” room was something out of a Horror movie if Horror movies had smell-o-vision. It was pungent, it was repugnant it couldn’t have come from a lady. But it did! A whole whack of them.

One of my kids had a race they had to run back to start and needed to use the facilities.

Before you shout, “We ALL had to go to the bathroom! That’s why we were in line.” I will be the first to admit, I am not suggesting my daughter’s bodily purges are in any way superior to anyone else’s, nor do I think she should have been given special treatment but I panicked and I was angry and the needles from the tattoo artist were making me woozy and my God the heat and I grabbed my kid and waltzed into the Men’s room where there was NOBODY and we locked ourselves in a stall, mouths zipped closed and she was in and out in less than 20 seconds, the echo from the flush the sweetest sound I’d heard since the home perm lady said she was ready to rinse.

Why was I so annoyed at this scene? It seemed totally unreasonable to me to force these women, children (many of whom were boys) to line up for hours to use one room when there was a perfectly good unused one with steam-folded towels, massage tables and fragrant soaps right next door.

All the men were using the lake to relieve themselves and the women (who are apparently above doing that but not above leaving ghastly things all over the place) had to stand and suffer.

Someone told me to draw a skirt on the stick-figure man over the restroom sign.

Next year, I’m packing a permanent marker to do just that. If that fails, I’ll use it to draw a mustache on myself and my kids.