road-trips

I like taking road-trips when they can be relaxed and slow paced.  I like to stop and see things along the way.  At least I think I would like that.  I've never been on that kind before.

When I was in college, I used to ride with a boy from VA to CO straight through.  We stopped for potties and food, but that was it.  Thirty hours on the road.  Oh, it makes me nauseated to even think about it now.

Once some other girls and I went up to Michigan from Virginia for Thanksgiving.  The trip there was fine.  The trip back - well... We had trouble with the car in Ohio where one of the girl's lived.  It was something wrong with the timing chain.  Her dad got it running but told us that no matter what we needed to make sure the engine kept running until we got back to school.  Well, at a little town in West Virginia, we pulled into a turn lane to get gas, and just like that the motor died.  You should have heard the moans.  We pushed it to a station and a very nice man worked on our car in the parking lot, in the rain, for the entire next day.  My dad was good enough to wire us money for a motel.  The man who fixed our car wouldn't even take money for helping us, but my friend forced some on him as we left.  

Once, I flew out to California to meet with my sister and drive home with her.  She had some kind of little Ford that didn't have AC.  It was summer.  We drove through Arizona.  If you've never driven through Arizona in the summer without AC, I suggest you keep it that way.

Then about sunset, just this side of Kingman, the car broke down.  There we were, two girls, rattlesnakes hiding everywhere, and the sun going down.  Finally a guy stopped and we prayed and got in his El Camino that we later noticed had a mattress in the back.  I think he lived there.  We kept praying.  We also mentioned that our dad watched America's Most Wanted.  He drove us back to a truck stop where we called for a tow and he refused to take any money.  We forced some on him before we left.  We got ripped off a bit by the garage.  It was the timing belt.

Once, my parents and I were driving through Missouri and the car broke down - timing belt.  Someone needs to do something about those things.  Do cars still have them?

I've also done a road-trip with my hubby and kids from here up to Wisconsin.  That was nicely incident free.  My in-laws used to live in New Mexico so we've been down there a few times, but that hardly even seems like a road trip to me.  A real road trip involves more than two states.  For a friend of mine, I won't mention names, it apparently only involves leaving the Denver metro area.

I've been on several trips on the east coast and I once went with my friend and her family up to Yellowstone.  All of these trips are so much better in retrospect than they were at the time I endured them.  But I love seeing our country and I really hope to take some time to take some road trips where the trip is as much a part of the trip as the destination.  Did you get that?