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Notes -
When is it acceptable to pee on the side of the road?
I've got 4 small kids (3 boys + 1 girl; only the girls is in diapers). We do a 2 hour road trip down to the grandparents about every other weekend. We always make them go to the bathroom before we leave, but we still have pee emergencies pretty much every trip.
For us, peeing on the side of the freeway is basically a must. If we try to find a proper bathroom, that's easily a 20+ minute detour. Driving to the bathroom is maybe 5 minutes, but then wrangling the problematic kid(s) is much more difficult in a dirty garage bathroom than on the side of the road. (I can't count the number of times I've had a kid wipe their junk on a public restroom toilet and then I have to do a serious disinfection...)
So my policy for side-of-road peeing is:
It has to be safe to stop.
There shouldn't be pedestrians around that can see us. (So this means no peeing on non-freeway type streets, and certain sections of freeway are also off limits.)
There has to be "nature" to pee on. Some amount of grass/dirt is okay, but a tree is best. If we're on the stretch of the I5 in Irvine, where there's concrete everywhere, we won't stop. (This is partly related to pts 1+2.)
I realized on this week's roadtrip that I've never seen another car parked with the kids out peeing. Am I breaking some sort of major taboo here?
I'm also not sure what I'll do once the girl isn't wearing diapers, and whether I'll allow / force her to pee on the side of the road.
Per my Alaskan upbringing — including a childhood where a 6-7 hour roadtrip across 220+ miles of road (one way), much of it winding two-lane mountain roads where it can be 80+ miles between gas stations, and there's often nowhere to pull off the road except the occasional gravel pit, was a common summer weekend activity — the answer was "whenever you can get far enough into the trees/bushes that someone on the road can't readily see you're doing so."
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