Road Trippin'

There is no way to travel that quite provides the comraderie and closeness of a road trip. The lost sleep, the constantly moving scenery. The nutty insane antics of nine creative people trapped in a rolling metal cubicle, hurtling along the interstate at 80 mph.

The quiet of the middle of the night, when I realized that I, in the very back of the van, and the driver, all the way up in front were the only ones awake... and he seemed to be on the verge of dozing off.

I saw his eyes in the rear view mirror, alternately squinting and bulging as he tried to keep the sandman at bay. I yelled at him, "Hey Mr. Bus Driver Guy! You okay up there?", which was just enough to wake up the Duck in the passenger seat, who fished a Diet Coke from the cooler and handed it the driver. We were okay after that.

I tried to go back to sleep.

Every time I closed my eyes, it seemed I was opening them again. Every time I laid my head back on the seat, the van hit an uneven seam in the highway and violently jarred me upright.

Every time we crossed from one state into the next, GoCartCherub would whine like a baby as loudly as she could, "Are we there yet?!" Wasn't she sweet and angelic?

Riding in the far back of the van was like being in another time zone. We were trapped and insulated and sound-proofed behind a wall of luggage that threatened to mark our very graves every time the van accelerated. If we screamed nobody could hear us at all. We could have been shouting insults to the bus driver the whole way and nobody would have noticed. Every time somebody in the back wanted something from the cooler in the front, we had to send a pony express rider and a homing pigeon.

We felt like the back-seat naughty step-children, and since no one paid any attention to us, we did the only thing we could do.

We slept. In between uneven highway seams and potholes, that is.

The road kill in the Carolinas is not something to be toyed with. You think you've smelled a carcass roasting on a hot summer highway? Think again. The pavement must be just the right temperature, to cook everything nice and slow, like a beef stew in a crock pot. It's not too hot that it incinerates the dead beast before it has time to cook properly, like in Texas. Nope. It's just right. Simmering all day in the heat so that when the night breezes come, that awful dead smell can ride the currents all over the state and stink to high heaven.

Every time we smelled the rank odor of roasting animal corpses, somebody squeezed the Bessie toy on the console, and she let out a tortured, "Mooooooo." I couldn't blame her. I would have made the same sound if I could have. Instead, I just pulled my hat over my face and smelled that.

Everytime we stopped for gas, Wild Thing and I scaled the luggage wall and rappelled down the other side, out of the van to momentary freedom. I for a Yoo-Hoo and a cigarette, and he for whatever it is that Wild Things enjoy eating. Almost anything, I'll bet.

Every time someone honked their horn, I wondered who Love was flashing, and every time I smelled the familiar stench of skunk or roadkill, I wondered if it was really just the Milkman passing gas, so he could squeeze Bessie one more time.

Yes. The traditional road trip is the only way to go.


SherriQ and I drove from Austin, Texas, through Houston and Beaumont, into Louisiana through Baton Rouge and around New Orleans, into Mississippi, through Gulfport and Biloxi, on into Alabama, through Mobile and Montgomery, where we picked up GoCart then finally, Atlanta, Georgia. From there, we hooked up with Love, Duck and Moo, Jaxxy, the Wild Thing and Liz Hayes, and rode in the gigantic, white whale of a van all the way to Bethlehem, PA and back.

There are more stories of the road to be told, and other things too, from the Writing.com Convention 2005.

next in the folder? "How it Might Have Been"