The Glories of Road Trips (if they don't drive you crazy first)

There's something about traveling that's in my family's blood. I don't know what it is, but somehow when my dad and mom came together, there was something that was so wonderfully mixed into the perfection of a traveller in them and their children. Or, more likely, my parents were so busy traveling to minister, us kids just got used to it and learned to enjoy it. Thus began our legacy of traveling.

For a young one, hours of driving is not always glamorous. There are many tedious hours where one must just sit and do nothing, if they have not the novelty to know what to do. Lucky for me, I had a creative family that had stores of games that we often played just for me, though more often than not it ended up being just my mom and me. The car game, the color game, twenty questions, alphabet, ghost, and cemetery were but a few of the numerous inventions to keep me occupied, many of them being cleverly designed to make me learn how to peer out the window with interest. This skill, once learned, would make it so that I could at times do nothing but stare out the window, half enthralled and half ignoring everything I saw.

In our good old-fashioned mini-van, there were two seats especially meant for me. One of them was what was known as "the junk seat." This was due to the fact that there were no windows where one could put their pillow on, and only one shoulder to use instead of two like there are in the middle of the back. I didn't mind this spot, however, because there was a bar across the passenger's seat that was just right for me to stretch my little legs and rest my feet upon. My other special seat was of course, the middle of the back, simply because I was the smallest and most conveniently squished. So in the middle of the back at four years of age I would reside in my booster seat, with Clyde almost always seated on my left. This was beneficial and a trial at the same time. Clyde and I would love to sit next to each other, because often we would bonk our heads together and laugh for the sheer pleasure of it. But sooner or later we were bound to get hurt or even argue, and suddenly my dad's eyes would loom up in the rear view mirror, giving us a look which we knew would be followed by a reprimand if we didn't stop. Our painful delight would often be quenched for reasons we could not fathom, but the father's will is law.

It is in the car as a family that some of the most amusing things can happen. Why, Clyde would never have told us that he was "tired of living in this haunt of jackals" if he weren't fed up with us in the first place, and my siblings would not have had the pleasure of laughing (laughing!) at Clyde and me for what we were fighting over (it's a very flustering feeling I assure you). Then of course Chad would have never declared, "Mountain men don't mind the heat," if we hadn't been in a hot vehicle, and I would never have replied that "mountain women don't mind air conditioning" if we weren't in a car with such facilities. We can have the greatest laughs ("there goes Olga!), the worst of fights (like Clyde hiding in his pillow case whenever he was angry), the most devoted of meetings, the most fascinating calculations (like trying to count up how many flush toilets there are at Fairwood), or the scariest of moments (as in peering down cliffs with no guard rails), all when you spend so many hours in one little space with your family.

Of course journeying isn't the only part of the journey. As everyone knows, arriving at your destination is usually the most exciting part. I don't need to inform you of every sight that we've beheld, and what famous places we've visited, because those are the sort of things you probably have already heard, but maybe the nights we had to spend at places along the way has not been an area you're enlightened in. Hey, you just spend a night at a hotel or motel and it's as easy as that, right? Wrong! For those who have traveled when you haven't always made reservations, you know how hard it can be to find just the right place for someone on a budget. Of course it has to be nonsmoking, they need to let you allow at least five people in the room, might we have a rollaway?, etc, etc, etc. We could go to many places before we found the right inn to lay our sleepy heads. Fortunately for my family, at a young age I could easily create a bed with two hotel chairs joined together to form a nest, and that meant they had to provide for one less spot for a person to sleep. However, sleeping isn't all done in hotels and motels (by the way, how many know the difference between the two?); it's done in campgrounds too. So we educated ourselves in the ways of a camper. We fell into the mold quite smoothly, and as it was a necessity it could be turned into a delight, if we so chose. Usually we had more than one tent when we did this, and of course there were times when your tent could become wet (Kendra transformed herself into the renowned Jemimah Puddleduck after such an experience, but of course the name was given to her by Craig), but those were the least of some of our worries. In Canada we found the cold, in Utah we found the heat, the sand, and we hoped not to find the scorpions. Chad never seemed to latch onto the whole camping thing, so on nights like these we found him sleeping in the van. There was a night though when we had our whole family in one tent. My mom and dad slept at one end, horizontally, my three brothers slept vertically in the middle, and Kendra and I lay horizontally at the end. This process didn't seem to work out for some, that cool night in the Rockies, even though we did attempt some very fine games of Pig. With these cramped quarters, Kendra would squeal every once in awhile that one of her brothers was kicking her, even though in fact it sounded more like it gave her a ticklish effect. Someone slept in the van every night of camping after that.

Of course there is much much more that could be told, with misunderstandings such as how someone forgot to close the roof top carrier which resulted in sending some of our luggage flying onto the interstate, or I could tell you of every break down I can remember having, or the times when certain persons would be moaning over someone else's seemingly precarious driving, or how many times we've driven straight through the night, or, or, or. . . . . . but that would certainly stretch out your valuable time, my dear reader, so I will just have to leave everything to your own wild imagination.