Going home

Think back on your most memorable road trip.

In 1983, I attended my first tech school and was hired before I graduated. The company was in Miami. Donna and I were still young with one child.

One and one half years later the division I was hired into fell on its face and over 100 people lost their jobs just like that. Me too.

We had zero dollars in the bank to start. After paying our debts with our final pay check we had $400 to our name. We rented a U-haul with a bad check and got out of town. I drove the truck with the dogs. Donna drove the station wagon with the kids and the cat.

I was never more terrified than I was driving behind my lead-footed wife. When we stopped the first night in Georgia, I yelled at her. So she yelled back,  “I wouldn’t have been driving so fast if you weren’t driving up my butt.”

I led the way from then on and she stayed a half mile behind.

The second night hotel stay i didn’t sleep at all.  I was worried we’d run out of money before we got home. The truck was nuzzling gas. While I was packing the car the next morning,  I wasn’t paying attention to my four year old son who followed me, then he strolled away. We spent the next ten minutes screaming for Jake, who was hiding under the car.

I needed a gallon of coffee to get going again.

The rest of the trip was more or less uneventful, except when the cat pooped in the car and nearly suffocated the rest of my family. Donna pulled off the highway so fast all I could do was pull over, lock the truck, and race back to the last exit praying they were there and still alive. I was about to lay into Donna again (verbally) when I saw the look on her face, and Jake sitting off the road holding his baby sister and the cat, while mom tried cleaning the cat carrier. I kept my mouth shut and helped.

Everything was going great when I found myself in NY trying to negotiate my way across eight lanes of bumper to bumper Yankee fans to get to my exit. She made it. I didn’t. A hundred miles or so further on we miraculously hooked up again. Thank God for small children and weak bladders.

We made it home about four hours after that, my sister’s house – we stayed there until I got back to work. I slept for two days.

It was a memorable trip alright. Just not the fun kind of memorable.