Road Trip!

There is a giddy excitement at the beginning of a road trip that cannot be duplicated by any other experience, and, as deemed by the laws of the universe, cannot possibly last more than an hour and a half. On this trip, that’s when we hit the rainstorm. 

Driving out of two weeks of sunny summer weather toward four days in Chicago,  Hubs happily drummed along to the beats of LCD Soundsystem on the steering wheel as our six year old daughter, known here as "Little D," sat strapped into her booster seat behind me, surrounded by a DVD player, a Nintendo DS, a CD player and a sack full of enough library books to last her through the end of 1st grade.  I had the luxury of being Front Seat Passenger and Snack Coordinator, whose job was to read my new book and pass a Gogurt behind me now and then.  An hour into the drive I was slightly startled to look up from my book and see random ploppings of giant rain splattering the windshield.

I realized with dismay that I hadn’t checked the weather for this trip.  I asked myself, What kind of idiot doesn't look at the forecast before they take off on a vacation?  I found solace in the realization  that there were two of this kind of idiot in the car, me and my husband, who was now no longer tapping out beats, but holding firmly to the wheel at ten and two.  Much like misery, stupidity loves company too.  Unwilling to waiver from the emotion known as "early road trip optimism," I imagined us driving through a cartoon rain cloud on a map and coming out the other side, rounding the bottom of Lake Michigan into a stretch of highway looked down upon by a smiling sun.  I turned a page in my book.

A few minutes later, the beat of the wipers turned frantic and Hubs turned down the music (the universal signal that this is some serious shit we're about to drive into).  I looked up to see sideways sheets of rain obscuring the view in front of us.  Wind gusted against the side of the car and Hubs said “Whoa” as he corrected for the 6 inches the car was just blown against its will.  I closed my book. 

The rain poured down in thick sheets, blurring the tail lights of the car in front of us.  All cars around us slowed down to a crawl, every driver no doubt having a conversation about whether to forge on or pull over.  Our conversation lasted three seconds.  The wind swept up again and a bucket of rain battered the windshield.  “Pull over,” I said.  Hubs was on it.  He put on the hazards and pulled in behind the car in front of us. We were stuck in Michigan’s first hurricane. 

The car rocked back and forth.  Leaves and sticks smacked the window.  I was pretty sure I saw Almira Gulch fly past the passenger window on her bicycle.  Despite my deep breaths, my heart was pounding, and I turned around to reassure Little D that everything would be okay.  She was hunched over in back, wearing her giant DJ headphones, sucking her thumb, eyes glued to the DVD player.  She hadn’t even noticed we had stopped moving. 

After five minutes of watching the tree next to our car bending in the wind and repeatedly estimating the distance from the base of the tree to the top of the tree and comparing it to the distance from the base of the tree to the roof of our car, I noted the GPS said it was only .8 miles until the next exit.  Hubs had announced a half an hour before the storm got bad that he had to pee.  I suggested that maybe we try getting to the nearest gas station so we could stretch our legs and go to the bathroom (and avoid being whipped into the imminent funnel cloud that I was sure was tearing a path straight toward our Prius).  Hubs was game.  He put his signal on and bravely pulled back on to the highway.  We made our way to the Marathon station in Paw Paw, which had the privilege of being attached to "Nibbles Cafe."  Little D finally looked up from her movie as we pulled into our parking spot.  “It’s over,” she announced. “What are we doing?”  We told her that we were stopping to stretch and wait for the rain to let up.  We dashed into the store as quick as we could, but were drenched within two feet of our car.  Shaking off like dogs once inside the door, we surveyed the scene.

“Do you have to go potty?” I asked her.  “No,” she said, like she always did.  “Well we’re going to try anyway,” I declared, and led her by the hand into the bathroom, which turned out to be quite instructional, with lots of handwritten signs, like: “Do not flush anything other than toilet paper down toilet,” and, once inside the stall: “Turn handle and push hard to open door.”  I wished I had some Post-It notes so I could add a few of my own "mom-oriented" signs.  Next to the door handle: "Don't touch anything you don't have to" and next to the toilet: "Do not even let your legs touch this seat."  I think it could have saved other traveling mothers a lot of time. 

At the Marathon station in Paw Paw, you can buy a t-shirt advertising the Road Kill Cafe (“You kill ‘em, we grill ‘em”) or a strawberry scented dream catcher to hang on your rearview mirror.  You can get a baby blue vanity plate for the front of your Camaro that says “High Maintenance” in sparkly cursive.  Everyone in that place was a nervous wreck and unusually happy to be there.  We exchanged stories with strangers.  A trucker coming from Oshtamo lamented in an accent that was a 20/80 mix of Midwest and Southern Ozarks that this was the second storm he and his wife had banana(?) today.  I realized I was going to need to listen much more intently to be able to follow his story.  Apparently, his wife was gonna have to travel on to Squinoma without him to get their grandkin home to their muddle, because he had to get back to his rig to carry a load of cheese to a hearse in Georgia.  I know in my heart that’s probably not what he was really saying, but that’s the very best translation I could come up with.  Hubs and I smiled, nodded our heads in fake understanding and wished him luck.

Little D was delighted with the sculpture section of the store, and I enthusiastically admired the motorcycle figurines and skull mugs with her, oohing and ahhing, because going on a trip is all about seeing new and amazing things when you’re six, and I was in charge of helping to create this experience.  As we browsed,  a frazzled woman named Barbie wearing a neon pink baseball cap paced in front of a display of ceramic wolf clocks, explaining into her cell phone that she is shaking like a leaf and she will be terribly late for her (electrolysis?) appointment.

We watched the lady behind the cafe counter slide foil-wrapped sandwiches down slotted rows in the deli case, announcing to no one in particular that “We got hamburgers made fresh.” We shuffled through the thick cloud of fried chicken vapors up and down the snack aisles for about 10 minutes, pretending like we were shopping, but really just waiting out the storm.  We selected a few items to purchase in exchange for the shelter, including a sleeve of honey roasted peanuts for Hubs and cracker and cheese food sandwiches for Little D, because I ran out of veto steam halfway through the second aisle.  After about twenty minutes, the rain finally died down and we felt secure enough to say goodbye to the safe haven of Marathon Gas and Nibbles Cafe.

Pulling back onto the highway past the screaming emergency vehicles headed toward Paw Paw, I felt a new lightness that can only come from the exhilaration of still being alive.  As I munched on my $5.99 box of Wheat Thins, Steve Miller’s “Come on and Dance” came on the only radio station that played music in Southwestern Michigan.  I knew with a confident sense of buoyancy that the smiling sun on the map was not far away at all.  “This is a classic,” I said, turning it up.  “You can’t deny Steve Miller.”  Hubs agreed, newly rejuvenated as well, commenting that Steve Miller’s “Greatest Hits” album is one of the only albums in the history of rock and roll that lives up to its name.  (When you’ve just cheated death, you can confidently make pronouncements like this.)  We got Little D set up with her mixed CD of pop hits, and we were back in this thing. 

It was smooth sailing for a long stretch until we were almost there.  Little D sang "Whip My Hair" loudly with passion, oblivious of the fact that we could hear her through her headphones, I read my book, and Hubs kept fruitlessly trying to strike up conversations to prevent himself from drifting off the side of the road.   After her CD was over, Little D found an entertaining game in which she tried to pull my hair with her bare toes. Apparently there were extra points for going back in for a toeful of hair approximately three minutes after I had been driven to final threats through clenched teeth.

When she was sufficiently scared (or more likely bored) from the results of that game, she asked me to play Star Wars with her.  She handed me a tiny plastic Jedi and, after a few half-hearted swipes with his light saber, I promptly laid him down on my shoulder and informed her that he was tired and wanted to take a nap.  (Have I told you yet that imaginative play with action figures is one of my greatest weaknesses as a parent?)  Just as I was gearing up to defend the fact that napping was a legitimate Jedi activity, Hubs announced that he could see the city! 

Coming up through the South Side of Chicago, we read signs aloud, and pointed out the L train stops.  Little D noticed how close some of the houses were to each other.  "I know what those are called," she proclaimed proudly.  "Cond-O-s," she said, with a cute little extra stress on the O. "My friend DJ lives in one, and his house touches another house," she said.   Hubs gently corrected her.  "Actually, hon, that is called the 'Ghett-o.' It's kind of like condos, only not quite as nice." 

As we cruised up I-90 past the architecturally star studded skyline of the Windy City, I couldn't help feeling like I was driving straight into a John Hughes movie.  It was like we were Ferris, Sloan and Cameron, coming in to play in the city.  Only in this car, Ferris and Sloan were thirtysomethings, and Cameron was six.  Like Cameron, Little D, truly is always the skeptic, half-convinced that we're not going to see anything good today.  We had our adversities, yes.  Our rainstorm, our minor irritations, our mind numbing stretches of nothing to see, but we had arrived.  We were in the city, and I just knew that we would have the time of our lives.  That feeling lasted, according to the laws of the universe, about an hour and a half.