Every summer, young adults, teenagers, and all kinds of people chase the dream of an All- American road trip. Whether you’re driving to a set destination, or just winging it and flipping a coin to determine your next turn, the possibilities are endless.
Every summer for as long as I can remember, my family would take a road trip to the beach for a week. The trips never typically lasted more than 10 hours (sometimes shorter if we changed beaches that year), but the time in the car never seemed as glorious as TV made it out to be. For starters, the weather was never ideal. It either rained, was pitch black outside, or in the sweltering heat of mid-day. We never had the opportunity to drive with the windows down and music on full blast.
But the weather was never the worst of it. Your parents probably drove the car; for me it was my father, and despite the pristine navigational skills of whoever sat shotgun, we always found ourselves turning on the wrong road, or sitting in an hours’ worth of standstill traffic. One time on a trip to Connecticut my Dad thought it would be fun to drive through big puddles of water and spray water everywhere, but that plan was soon thwarted when the water knocked the belt off of the car and the car broke down.
But even those don’t compare to the annoyances that are bathroom breaks, when one person in your car absolutely must use the bathroom at that moment, but everyone else is fine. Until two hours later that is. It seems that by the time you reached your destination you have made enough stops to place at least one every hour.
Now that my slight rant is done, I want to re-assure you that not all parts of the road trips are bad. Like, for example, the small pure moment of bliss when you get to stop for food. Or when you and your family have that one song that comes on and your whole family just busts out into a sing along. But then again, even those are sometimes destined for failure. Like this one time when my family and I stopped at Chik-Fil-A for lunch and I left a milkshake on the hood of the car. Luckily a lady flagged us down to let us know, but by then, my dad hit the breaks too hard and our whole windshield was covered in cookies and cream.
Despite the unpredictability of the road and the unbelievably annoying things that can happen, these trips provide everlasting memories for you and your family throughout the years to come. So even if the glamour of being tightly packed into a sardine can for 10 plus hours with people that know exactly how to push your buttons doesn’t seem ideal, it is.
