Last week, the family and I cruised up the coast to D.C. to sample a little Orange Alert hospitality. The highlight of the weekend for my son Max was watching the big fish in the Amazonia building at the National Zoo. The highlight of the weekend for me was picking up a few six-packs of contraband (in terms of N.C. law, anyway) brew at Chevy Chase Liquors. The highlight for my wife Barbara was an excursion to the northern Virginia IKEA proving grounds.

It's really not right to call IKEA a store, given that its floor space is best stated in square miles--football fields being woefully inadequate as units of measure. I'm pretty sure you can see any given IKEA from the International Space Station.

For those not acquainted with IKEA, the store sells furniture, furnishings and a whole lot of other stuff. The parent company is Swedish, which explains the garish yellow and blue paint job on the outside of the building. "IKEA" may sound Swedish, but it is not, in fact, a Swedish word. It has something to do with the initials of its founder or something like that. Similarly, every little (and big) thing sold in the store has a Swedish-sounding name that (for the most part) isn't actually a Swedish word. For example, the shelving units upon which my CDs sit are from the IVAR collection. If you want to buy a particular type of clothes hamper, you might buy a PYRE (some of the fake words are strangely unfortunate). A certain type of frying pan is called a PYRA. And so on.

The appeal of IKEA is that you can buy cheap Scandinavian furniture at moderate prices. IKEA's prices are inexpensive if you drive a BMW. If you drive a Honda, well, they're at the high end of affordable. But if you like the look of pine and you don't mind a little bit of sway to your bookshelves, well, IKEA's stuff should work just fine.

Anyway, besides my CD shelves, we own an IKEA silverware set (eight settings, $20, hasn't rusted after five years), an IKEA coffee table (our son Max has pounded the pine surface into a fine replication of a Michigan highway in April, but since the thing cost $99, we aren't complaining) and various and sundry little household items.

Some two-and-a-half hours into our visit, Barbara decided that we ought to ditch the stroller and schlep Max around in an official IKEA cart (these strongly resemble grocery carts--except that they have all-wheel turning capability for sharp maneuvers among the crowds). Oh yes, the crowds. Our previous IKEA experiences came in Pittsburgh and Baltimore, where the shopping was leisurely and it wasn't too tough to stride through the massive displays. The Woodbridge, Va., location was another story entirely.

Granted, almost all the yuppies in the D.C. area live in Virginia. If you've got old money or no money, Maryland is the place. But if you're getting by on a mere $200,000 a year while you wait to make partner, Virginia is the place to be. And just about all of those folks seemed to have descended on this particular IKEA the day we were there.

Anyway, in order to accomplish Barbara's request (see two paragraphs back for details), I had to drag the stroller (sans Max, thankfully) through the upper floor, down the stairs (which I found after waiting 15 minutes in an unsuccessful bid to get on an elevator), through the lower floor and down some more stairs to the underground parking lot. Then I repeated the process in reverse, finding a cart and ascending the IKEA to where I left Barbara and Max.

They weren't there.

Did I mention the size of IKEA? It wouldn't surprise me to learn that 30,000 people passed through the doors that day. I had to somehow wander through the crammed aisles and hope I could find two particular people. The one advantage I had was that two-and-a-half hours of IKEA was more than enough for Max, and he was actively voicing his displeasure. I'm a stay-at-home dad; I know what his cries sound like; I review records and am easily able to discern the slightest difference in pitch and duration. This mission would be a cinch.

There's nothing to take that ol' "parent-of-the-year" feeling away when you realize that just about every child's cries and moans of displeasure sound a hell of a lot like your own child's. Oh, there are indeed subtle differences, but you don't really notice them until you've walked thirty yards in the wrong direction. I was able to reject about half of the cries right away, but my frantic dashes to "Max" and his cries always led me to some other pissed-off 15-month-old.

Note to parents: A day at IKEA may be the equivalent of a trip to Disney World for you, but it's pretty much hell for any child under the age of ten. Even if you drop them off in Smalworld (or whatever dreadful fake Swedish word they use to describe their child-abandonment zone), after a while the kids get tired of destroying flimsy furniture and want to go where they can do some real damage. Like, say, your home.

Anyway, I ended up finding Barbara and Max with my eyes and not my ears. We bought a plastic bar stool (the second most common IKEA elemental after pine) and some other knicknacks. We spent less than $20 an hour for the three-and-a-half that we spent in the store, which is pretty good, I guess. And we swore that the next time Barbara had the absolute need to go to IKEA, we'd drive the extra hour-and-a-half to the one in Baltimore. For starters, there's a great brewpub nearby, and anyway, IKEA just isn't IKEA if you've got to fight off the other shoppers with a PYRE. Or is that a PYRA? I just can't remember.

Jon Worley had a good time at IKEA until the little yuppie punks attacked his stoller and spray-painted "Father, Son and George W. Bush" on the back.