Road trippage

I simultaneously love and dislike road trips. I dislike them because they mean you're not there yet (yes, I'm about six), and also because road trips indicate a need to come back home again when the fun is over.

I love, them, however, because they have the immense potential to be hilarious. I've had some good road trips in my day, I'm telling you. There were road trips I had "back in the day" when I used to travel with a certain pack of people, and we generally chose to drive through the night, for some reason. I was usually voted co-pilot, due to my never having anything pressing the following day, so I got very good at keeping drivers awake.

There were road trips I used to take with my best friends down to Florida every year. For some reason they were never hilarious (though full of the Lord's mercies, due to weather and me not knowing how to drive very well) but they were just... nice. I remember one year we left North Carolina in the morning to head down to Florida and talked non-stop almost the entire way. Ooh, and once we went to Savannah, in honor of Savannah from Savannah. We took pictures with the books and everything.

There's one road trip I took with my best friend wherein we drove all through the night in time to arrive for a morning funeral. We pretty much just drove in our pajamas and did whatever we wanted. Again, it was of the Lord's mercies that we arrived in one piece, due to no gas stations being open (New York is retarded....), but He provided.

And there was the time when we had a van full (too full, actually, we had about three more people than seat belts) of people and were trying to get across the Canadian border. The Lord ended up sending along someone we knew to the gas station we were stopped at before the border (have I mentioned anything about the Lord's mercies?) and we shuffled around and it was fine, but we brought our binoculars so we could scope out a nice-looking border guard whose booth we wanted to hit, and we "spied" at the border, which was hilarious. Same trip, we were coming home and managed to joke around with our border guard. He thought we were pretty funny.

And the time I famously told the border guard (another trip, by the way) that we didn't have any food to declare, only some "samiches." He thought I was either crazy or hilarious, I'm not sure which.

I could have a lot of border crossing stories, but that's not what I'm getting at.

What I'm actually getting at is that I took a road trip with my brother and cousin this weekend, and it was awesome. Some road trips are nice, you know, where there's some talking, some sleeping, some reading, and it's all cool. This one had some sleeping and reading, but the talking was just brilliant.

We were traveling normally until I decided that we just had to play "Hey Cows" from the highway.

Interjection: Hey Cows is a game where you yell "Hey, cows" at a field of cattle, and if any of them look at you (or look like they're looking at you), then you "win." Of course, you don't win anything, and it's not really a game, but it's sort of hilarious if you're in the right mindset.

Anyhow, we Hey Cow'd for a while (and Hey Horse'd, and some other Heys, I forget what) and then started waving at truck drivers, so as to hear them honk. Then we transferred to waving at just regular-type drivers. And then we started making up stories about the drivers we were passing. Then we started talking in accents, and then it was all down-hill from there.

The stories we concocted were over the top. We were suddenly all really old for some reason (I'm not talking 103, I'm talking alive-during the civil war, had a crush on John Quincy Adams, used to live in England when they didn't have cars type of old), and my cousin was a school teacher who rode crocodiles to work every day (you know, the first version of crocs), and taught children nothing but how to dodge the things she threw at them. I had the crush on John Quincy Adams, and when I went to school, I learned useless words like effulgence and erroneous. I'd never been married, but my cousin had been married about seven times (I guess when you're as old as we were, your husbands are liable to die), most of whom she didn't like. Elgin was one of her favorites, and Elgin was pretty famous, apparently, since there was a whole town named after him.

Anyhow, the car was filled with this nonsense for at least two hours, until we arrived (I think my brother was extra-thankful to get there) and had to converse with polity society again. Both of us were talking with a vaguely old-timey accent for sort of a while, but it wore off.

Times like that remind me, though, that even if you don't make the journey about the stopping points (we get gas. And that's all), you can enjoy it none the less. Granted, I'd still prefer to break through the time/space continuum and get there (there meaning everywhere) in about .7 seconds, but I think I'm fine with the journey.

Plus, I'm used to it. I mean, I did travel with Lewis and Clark, after all.