We drove our remaining child at home to his sleepaway camp last week, five hours from home. The first few hours were pleasant but around the halfway point it turned into a tense drive. Our 16-year-old son with Familial Dysautonomia, a genetic disease, had one of his episodes where he feels nauseous and retches to the point where he needs medication to stop it. The medicine helps him to sleep so his body can reset.

As he rested in the backseat, my husband and I were each in our own head, hating our son’s disease and the extra stress it adds to our lives. One minute, we were on the verge of dropping him off for twelve days, anticipating a festive trek to New York City before returning home. The next, we each wondered silently if our son would be okay for the drop-off. Fortunately he drifted off to sleep so we were relieved and optimistic that the day, and our vacation, would be salvaged.

I suggested to my husband that we make a pit-stop before getting to camp so upon arrival I would be calm instead of frantically looking for a restroom. It was a cloudy day with a bit of drizzling rain. We pulled off the road at a dismal looking gas station, wondering if they even had a bathroom as the building was so small and we didn’t see any bathroom doors on the outside.

It had been a long drive so I forged ahead. I walked through a tiny market and found there was a clearly marked “Womens” bathroom on the right and a “Mens” on the left. Channeling Julia Louis-Dreyfuss (Elaine) from the airplane episode of Seinfeld, I steeled myself and tentatively pushed open the bathroom door. Instead of the usual dirty, smelly, disgusting public bathroom, I walked into Nirvana – a brightly lit oasis of loveliness. Was I in the Twilight Zone? There were two stalls, and a counter with two sinks. A granite counter, or something that looked like granite. The whole room was extremely clean, almost as if I were in someone’s home who had cleaned especially for company. There were decorations and a sign saying “With God’s Help, Anything is Possible.” Even a clean, gas-station bathroom apparently.

The joy and gratitude I felt was immense. I almost did not want to leave my little slice of paradise, but life was outside that door waiting for me. Giddily, I asked my husband if he had as pleasant a bathroom experience as I had. He said it was the nicest gas station bathroom he too had ever been in. In the men’s bathroom there were antique car parts, highly polished and displayed as artwork on the walls, with plaques underneath them noting what make, model, and what part of the car it came from. We picked up drinks and were rung up by a man we assumed to be the owner. I gushed over his lovely bathroom and thanked him for his efforts. He modestly thanked us and wondered why most other gas stations don’t take the time to keep their bathrooms in decent shape.

This man’s establishment gets the gold-medal of gas station cleanliness in my book. For the rest of the trip, that bathroom became the benchmark against which all other bathrooms were measured, possibly going forward for the rest of my life.

I was in a bad way—tired, worried about my son and hoping my vacation wouldn’t be ruined. This pit-stop in rural New York was a beacon of kindness and caring that I apparently needed at just that moment. Its fresh scent, cleanliness and bounty of toilet paper, soap and paper towels gave me a big cosmic hug, restoring my faith that people are kind and considerate. This was the trip’s highlight, and we hadn’t even made it to Manhattan yet. Start spreading the news.