Someone
needs to come up with a more rigorous definition of “road trip,”
because the internet is no help in the matter. Wikipedia, everyone’s
favorite source for factually dubious information, describes road trips
in vague terms, saying they typically occur over a “large land mass.”
This is not useful. One could conceivably label Dwayne “The Rock”
Johnson as a large land mass, but few people would
call it a road trip if you ran over him with a Cadillac Escalade.
Without
a firm definition, it’s hard determine whether or not I’m actually a
fan of road trips. I guess it would depend on their length. Journeys
that take less than a day to complete -- “day trips,” if you will --
are fine. They can even be a lot of fun, depending on where you’re going
and who’s keeping you company. Anything longer than that and you start
thinking about hotels and driving in shifts
and lots of other pesky annoyances. When the simple act of going to the
bathroom becomes a complex logistical concern, that’s where I draw the
line. Human civilization being as advanced as it is, I am definitely not
OK with peeing behind a roadside cactus.
If that makes me a weenie, I’m at peace with that.
Roads
trips have a certain aura of romanticism, I’ll give ’em that much.
Whether this is due to Hollywood portrayals or people’s actual
experiences
is hard to tell. Movies like “Thelma and Louise,” “Little Miss
Sunshine” and “Logan” certainly make them seem enticing, but then again
you never see Thelma disentangle herself from the car after 12 hours to
massage her tingling butt cheeks. Logan never walks
around in circles wincing because his leg’s been asleep since Tulsa.
A
cowboy I’m not. In the old west, hardscrabble journeymen would spend
days on horseback living on nothing more than loose tobacco and
moonshine
whiskey (or as I call it, the Humphrey Bogart diet). Heck, even before
that era, folks would plod along endless stretches of country in
stagecoaches and horse-drawn carriages, sweating mercilessly into their
bonnets and leather chaps, bottoms sore from wooden
benches. People today are soft -- and by people, I mean me. I won’t
even drive to work without a functioning heater and a bottle of
vanilla-flavored seltzer water.
Certain
prerequisites have to be met in order for me to undertake any sort of
prolonged journey, and chief among them is an attractive destination.
I’m not scrunching my 6’4” frame into a Hyundai Accent for an entire
day to see a ventriloquist perform at a rural community college.
Acceptable endgames for road trips include family visits, epic concerts,
extended stays in exotic cities, or a closed-door
meeting with a magic genie to discuss the terms of my three wishes.
Anything short of that and I’m staying home and reading X-Men comics.
Road
trips are most useful when you’re covering a distance too short for an
airline and too long for a bicycle. About 10 years ago a group
of friends and I decided to spend a few days in Montreal, structuring
this excursion around a rock concert because we’re all massive dorks. It
took roughly nine hours to get there, and with six of us crammed into a
van, that was about my limit. The company
itself was great -- I’m lucky to hang with a good bunch -- but what
seemed like a comfortable seat at the outset slowly became a Medieval
torture device, the cushions sinking their way into my aching glutes
like a nickel into a wad of Silly Putty. By the time
we stopped off at a roadside burger joint for our first restroom break,
my body was chair-shaped and useless, folded in two in a sinister human
origami experiment. I wonder how many travelers at the pit stop saw my
hunched-over frame and thought I was looking
for a missing contact lens.
Height
was an issue, too, because with that many people in the van I had to
twist and writhe myself into a position that wouldn’t be intrusive
to other human beings. While not as bad as sitting in the middle seat
on a plane, it still created issues, and surely contributed to my
road-related aches and pains. There’s a rough mathematical formula that
can illustrate the relationship between freakish
height and road trip pain: Height times duration divided by vehicle
equals ouch.
Survival
in these situations is largely dependent on preparation -- which means
you should have plenty of gas, money and food. Especially food,
and the junkier the better. I try (and often fail) to avoid junk food,
but long road trips are the reason why potato chips, Cheetos and
Twizzlers were invented to begin with, and if you’re not chomping on
something-or-other while the exit signs whiz past,
you run the risk of losing your freakin’ mind. Road trip games are
mostly tedious and the best music in the world is only enjoyable for so
long, but bring a cannister of kettle corn and some pickled sausages and
you may just make it to Newark with your sanity
intact. Of course there’s still the question of why you feel compelled
to drive to Newark, but hey, if you’ve got family in the New Jersey
mafia, that’s your business.
Road
trip season is coming, and fast. Soon I’ll be driving down Route 1 and
grinding my teeth in deadlock traffic as travelers from Quebec,
Massachusetts and various Martian space colonies all fight for space at
beaches and water parks, restaurants and summer bungalows. Few
annoyances aggravate me more than car-clogged roadways, but this year my
plan is to focus on this thought: Each car contains
a story. The family of four screaming through Saco in their
Virginia-plated Mazda made an epic trip for tangible reasons. And for
all I know, they’ve made all the right moves -- the cash, the fuel, the
Pringles in their oblong tennis-ball cans. Are they visiting
grandma? Do they have a summer home in Camp Ellis? Ah, the allure of
the unsolvable mystery.
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