Road Trip Highlights

We completed our 12-hour road adventure from Austin to Pensacola Beach about 36 hours ago. Here are some of the highlights of our time on the road.

• Listening to "Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business" book on CD. I surprised myself by laughing out loud more than once listening to this tale. I must admit - that girl is funny.


• Hearing snippets of the Animaniacs waft forward from the backseat. I think my favorite one was Yakko singing the countries of the world to the tune of the Mexican Hat Dance. Although I did also enjoy Pinky and the Brain (YYESS!) My laptop now serves as our portable DVD player on roadtrips. We have come a long way since we used to strap our combo TV/VCR into the front seat with tie-down straps and carted along a HUGE shoebox full of video tapes - yes, video tapes, those ancient relics from the 20th century).


• Annoying the children by asking numerous times who would like to learn the 50 states in alphabetical order. Shockingly, no takers.


• Quizzing my husband (and myself) on the state capitals. We managed to come up with nearly all 50, but got stuck on Illinois (I have no explanation for this - I am ashamed). For the life of me, I could not bring it to mind. (By the way, if you find yourself suddenly drawing a blank, the answer is Springfield.) I had to solicit a clue from my parents as soon as we arrived. I know every parent dreams of being greeted this way by their child who they see once or twice a year, "Hi, Mom & Dad, so good to see you, yeah, we missed you too - hey, don't tell me the answer - just give me a clue - what's the capital of Illinois?"


• Listening to my six year old sing the Books of the Bible song all by herself. Just try singing 'Hosea, Joel, Amos and Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, and Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi' with one breath of air and see how you fare. It ain't easy.

Let's call these next two "memorable" moments:

• Stopping at a Radio Shack in Houston - the reason for this stop is one of those universal road trip experiences -- Picture children strapped into the idling van (where they have been for 15 minutes already because they are just so darned excited about riding in the car). Parent #1, "Honey, where is the thing for the thing?" Parent #2, "I don't know, where did you put the thing?" Parent #1, "I didn't use the thing last. It should be in the thing" etc. The 'thing' this time was a key component of our DVD sound system. We lost at least 15 minutes on the front end of our trip in the fruitless search for the component. The trip to Radio Shack was to simply purchase a new one. Titus, having already gone inside the store, returned to the car to discuss with me the new purchase price of said component (and where exactly are all of these 'deep discounts' I keep hearing about on the news?). In the midst of this debate about how important said component REALLY was for our trip it occurred to me to check the laptop bag - VIOLA! We saved $50 and lost at least 30 more minutes. But the real fun of this diversion was sitting in the car and hearing a loud "PULL OVER TO THE RIGHT" and watching 2 police cars pull some guy over in the space directly behind us and blocking us in with their cruisers. It was one of those moments when you just say, "Seriously? I mean ... seriously?" Thankfully, there were no firearms, nightsticks or violent take-downs involved and we were able to extricate our van without incident.
  
• Visiting a Wendy's somewhere in Mississippi late on Christmas eve, ordering our burgers, getting back into the car, opening our wrappers, realizing the order is wrong, going back into Wendy's, explaining the mix-up, receiving the corrected burger, getting back into the car, opening the corrected order, realizing, oh yeah, it's still wrong, going back into Wendy's, smiling politely while explaining, I'm very sorry for the trouble, but I ordered it withOUT cheese, listening to the manager dress down the staff in the background, quickly running back to the car, checking the burger and .... hooray! The upside - at least one of our burgers was hot ... sort of. This is why I pack our own food on trips.