Road Trip
Every time I think, “This will be fun. We’ll see some sights and enjoy each other’s company.” Every time. Then, we get in the car, on the road and reality slaps me in the face…repeatedly.
Road trips are not fun, not for me anyway. Here is how today’s trip went:
One hour on the road and I am starting to feel frazzled. Traffic is awful, road construction everywhere, and crazy, reckless drivers are on all sides of us. We left home on time, but somehow we are already behind schedule, and this causes my husband to feel stressed, even though this schedule is self-imposed and can easily be changed.
Two hours in and Eric’s phone is cheerfully announcing, “GPS signal lost”, every two minutes. The AC is freezing one spot on my arm and I can’t figure out how to adjust it without freezing some other spot or cooking in the bright sun shining through the windshield. And my butt is numb. NUMB. We still have two hours to go.
We left home at 8am and at 1:50 we had just crossed the Texas state line. We had stops to make: my mother-in-law’s to leave our tithe check, Walmart for sunscreen and travel size toothpaste, and Cabela’s for…well, just because we were close and Eric thinks it’s a sin to drive past a Cabela’s store and not go inside. For an hour. All these detours result in our total trip time being 2 hours longer than we expected. Not good.
I like the idea of travel. It sounds like fun when my husband says, “Hey, let’s go to Arlington for the ball game.” I’m like, yeah, that sounds great. A few days away from our jobs, away from home-just me and my love in a nice hotel, no cooking, dishes or laundry.
Getting to the hotel, that’s where I have a problem. If Eric and I are going to disagree, it will be in the car. We had our first tiff today less than half an hour from home. The love of my life likes to Google “restaurants in Arlington” while he’s driving, and I like to keep living-hence the tiff. I think he doesn’t always pay enough attention to the road when he’s driving, and he thinks I need to sit there and look pretty. Anyway, these ‘road trip tiffs’ seldom get t
o the name-calling-nit-picking-pull-over-and-let-me-out point, but they are unpleasant nonetheless.
We finally arrived at our destination, safely and our relationship intact after six hours in the car. Our room is nice, the bed huge and comfortable. All is right with the world. In three days we will do it all over again to get back home. Six hours is not too bad, we can do it.
In October we are going to Florida…
I think maybe we should fly.