Tuesday Tea: Share a road trip story: good, bad, in between!
Roadside attractions, family squabbles, adventures big and small
Last year, we asked you about your favorite road-trip snacks. As you might expect, cheese got a lot of love, but we were surprised to see so many shout-outs to Combos — and this wins for snack poetry: ‘Plain M&Ms that have been left on the sunny dashboard until the chocolate melts.’
I mean, it can be made into a haiku:
Plain ol’ M&Ms
Left on the sunny dashboard
’Til chocolate melts
Dave and I are planning a trip to the States this summer to see family and friends, and that’s had us reminiscing about previous road trips on long American highways. There’s the time we drove from San Francisco to move to Austin and drove along Route 66: Hello, Wigwam Motel (Holbrook, AZ), and The Big Texan (Amarillo, TX), where we did not take the 72-ounce steak challenge.
On our last trip to the US, we drove from eastern PA to Ohio, listening to SirusXM 1st Wave for hours. In between singing along with Squeeze, Depeche Mode, and Roxy Music, we read to each other from In the Woods by Tana French. (My favorite read-along-in-the-car book was The Last Cruise by Kate Christensen, which made it into our podcast episode The Sea: Tales of Poets and Pirates and cemented Dave as my favorite IRL audiobook narrator.)
On that trek, I also left my iPhone in a bathroom stall (!) that required a 45-minute round trip on a toll road (!) to retrieve it.
Sigh.
When I think of road trips, I think of:
shoes off
windows down
big cup of Diet Coke with lots of ice (or coffee with too much vanilla-flavored creamer) in the cup holder
Doritos dust on my fingertips
being as silly as possible
I just finished a 22 hour road trip with my Mom. I'm the oldest of three daughters, so I haven't spent that much time alone with her for 48 years (then sister #1 came along). It was so great! We never even turned on the radio, just hours and hours of her telling me about her childhood and early adulthood. I learned so much. Being a mom myself, I was reminded of how we take that on as our primary identifier, but we've lived such a life outside of that.
I've been intentional about doing trips individually with each of our three kids and it reminded me of what a gift that is.
Oh wow. My wife and I moved from the Bay Area to Vegas (0/10, do not recommend) in 2014. Most of our shit had shipped ahead, and on the closing day we packed our car to the brim with our most personal effects, tucked ourselves and Kitty (whom I dearly loved but to whom I was deathly allergic) into our car and hit the road.
The good: I had compiled a Viva Las Vegas themed playlist which kept us company for almost all the seemingly endless 11 hours of our drive. Plus, of course, things like passing the dinosaurs!
The bad: I had to drive, since my wife needed to be available to manage Kitty, to whom I was really as yet only a step mama. And, of course, right as we exited our garage, my wife unzipped Kitty's carrier (she was, of course, already moaning up a storm) and Kitty promptly leapt from carrier in back seat to wife's lap in front seat, in the process, swiping her floofy tail across my surprise-widened eyes, inducing a massive allergy attack, and necessitating a stop at the nearest pharmacy so that I could grab eye drops and benadryl, which somehow I hadn't packed in my handbag. Helluva way to start a long, terrifying journey!
(Postscript: Kitty grew to trust me, I figured out how to mostly manage my allergies, and we became the absolute closest of pals over the years. I was as devastated as my wife when we lost her, aged 22, a few years ago.)