Road Trip

We’re just back from a week’s vacation which included a five day road trip to Monticello, the Blue Ridge Mountains and the surrounding Virginia countryside.  The views were spectacular with the seasonal beauty of  spring greenery dotted by dogwoods and red buds.  Riding in a minivan with tilt-back captain’s seats, listening to Sirius radio with a clear signal even in the most remote places and stopping when we needed to stretch made the eight-plus hour drive zoom by.

Naturally, we did some reminiscing about family road trips of the past.  Our family vacations were a lot of fun if you didn’t count the driving part.  Long car trips all started with a 3:00 a.m. departure so, as my dad put it, we could get some miles under our belts before sun-up.  He would pack the car the night before, but

we always had to haul out last minute items like coolers, pillows and toothbrushes to stage-whispered commands of  “SHHH,” “NO, THAT GOES IN THE TRUNK” and “DAMMIT, DON’T LET THE SCREEN DOOR SLAM AGAIN.”  After all that, I guess there was a possibility that one or two of the neighbors might still be sleeping, so we would hold the car doors closed while Dad eased up the driveway and slowly pulled out of our street.  Once we had turned the corner and were part way down Westbrook, he gave the word and we slammed all four doors in unison. I’d love to know where that idea came from.

The real problem was that there were three of us kids, which was one too many.  Opinions varied as to which one to leave at a roadside rest stop. Should my parents jettison the whiner, the troublemaker or the

up-chucker?   They were never able to make a decision so we squeezed into the back seat, fighting over the window seats.  Sitting in the middle was the triple whammy. You had a hot, sticky body on either side, you didn’t get a window and your feet had to straddle the hump.  My mother had some system for deciding whose turn it was for the middle, but I know for a fact that I got it much more often than anybody else.  My only defense was to get carsick which might be rewarded with a stretch in the front seat.

When the roar of the crowd got loud enough, Mom’s solution was to reach into the back seat and blindly deal out a few smacks to any stray legs or arms.  Naturally, her target protested, “I wasn’t doing anything.”  A believer in centuries-old mothering techniques, her response was, “Maybe not, but this is for the next time.”  My dad, a long time Cincinnati Bell employee, lost patience with the back seat bickering and regularly threatened to install three telephone booths.  That sounded good to me – it might have been a little claustrophobic but at least those little creeps wouldn’t have been touching me. 

With air conditioning and the current in-car video equipment, road trips with kids can be more like a day at

the movies, without the popcorn (or judging by the condition of many family cars, maybe with the popcorn.) We amused ourselves with highway Bingo, tallying license plates from different states and that old stand-by, Three Thirds of a Ghost, a game which loses something after the youngest member of the family is the ghost for the 400th time in a row.  We also had a game called Hi-Q with a lot of little plastic pegs that you jumped around on a board.  I can’t remember exactly how it worked. As car entertainment, however, Hi-Q was history after my brother made a rubber band slingshot and accidentally shot a plastic peg between my dad’s eyes and his glasses while he was driving.  Impressive but not something you’d want to repeat.

Paul and I weren’t exactly eager to do road trips once we had kids. (You’ll have to ask Paul about his family road trips, the last of which involved seven kids on a three week tour of the West and California in a station wagon with a ton of luggage piled up on a rooftop rack.   Not an adventure for the faint of heart.)    What little enthusiasm we had was dampened pretty quickly after a car trip to Michigan when David was about 6 months old.  He was fine in the car seat on the drive there, but, over the weekend, he learned to pull himself up to a standing position.  From that point on, sitting was one of those “been there, done that” experiences.  Having to sit in his car seat for the drive home threw David into a rage that lasted for the entire six (or was it sixty) hours.   It was several years before we attempted another road trip of any type.

Eventually we did venture out on short family road trips to places like Spring Mill, Indiana and Red River Gorge, Kentucky. Longer drives took us to Chicago for sightseeing and Michigan for skiing and time with

family and friends.    Later, vacations in British Columbia, Wyoming and England began with airplanes but also required significant road time.  Road trips with our kids all had one common element – the ending.  It made no difference if the drive took one hour or ten hours. It made no difference if our route went through beautiful, mountain scenery or dull, flat spaces.  It made no difference if the trip offered interesting stops along the way or was a straight slog through mile after mile.  In the last 10 to 15 minutes when we were desperately trying to get to our hotel, the rental car return or our front door, chaos broke out in the back seat.  Then, from the depths of primal parent instinct, those familiar, spine tingling words would erupt, unbidden, from my lips. “Don’t make me pull this car over.”  Sometimes that worked.