I love road trips. The open road, the junk food I would never allow under normal circumstances, the MP3s or books on tape, the musical variety, the changing scenery, the endless possibility... It feels like coming home, or leaving it, or whatever. Growing up, family vacations were synonymous with road trips. My dad at one point drove semi trucks for a living and would sneak us kids on some of his trips out to California (from AZ). I have fond memories of those road trips. Even the ones where my dad would pick up hitch hikers smelling of urine and skunk in the close proximity of the truck's cab, or the time we would have to spend by ourselves at gas stations a few miles away from our dad's work (kids weren't technically allowed on his haul, so we'd have to wait while he picked up the truck).
Matt and I left for our road trip a few days ago, I think. Time is hard to keep track of, it feels like we've been on the road for weeks now. It's fall, so the leaves are changing color and the scenery is gorgeous. We drove pretty much straight through from Atlanta to Northern Minnesota where Matt has family. It's about a 24 hour drive or so. Matt and I switched off driving and stopped for about three hours (in the wee hours of the morning when neither of us can keep our eyes open a minute longer) at a rest stop to pass out in the car. Safe, I know, but we're on a limited time budget.
We got to Matt's family's house last night, it was so nice to sleep in a bed. I fell into a sleep coma fairly early and was hesitant to get out of bed this morning. We left bright and early, and the first thing we noticed was the check engine light on. Pulling over, we didn't find anything glaringly wrong with the engine. Matt looked up the nearest dealership on our way to the next stop on our road trip.
So, here we are at the dealership in Fargo, North Dakota. Fingers crossed that the problem is not serious, and we don't end up here for our entire trip. I have definitely spent an entire week broken down on a road trip once, it was a defining moment. It was my second road trip from Arizona to Atlanta and I was with my older sister. We were driving a new, for me, used car my dad had just purchased. It turned out to be a bit of a lemon, needless to say. I was still in high school, my sister was in college. We broke down in the middle of nowhere in west Texas.
A minor problem, the engine broke. This was before either of us had a cell phone, and we spent the night in the car. We broke down at 2 AM, and got picked up by the border patrol in the morning. No joke, the border patrol. Not because we look like illegal aliens or anything like that (though we do look ambiguously "ethnic," I won't deny that). We were waking up and my sister was wiping the condensation from the windows when she saw a car with lights on top in the rear view mirror and flagged them down. The car just happened to be the border patrol. The friendly man took us to the nearest town, with its population somewhere in the hundreds, maybe less. I opted for fixing my car versus leaving it and taking a bus, which took an entire week to fix.
My sister and I stayed in what we started calling the "Baits" Motel (after the movie Psycho), so deemed by us for the slashed shower curtains, and what looked like blood stains on the carpet. So much of what happened on that trip did not feel real. It felt more like some nightmare hidden camera show where all of the characters were in cahoots, but we were the unknowing victims. The creepy guy that worked at the hotel would knock on our door late at night, sounding intoxicated, and would invite us to play pool with him. Our entire motel room was covered in cat hair, and we found out from one of the workers that stray cats would stay in the room when it was unoccupied. We slept fully clothed with our hoods up on our sweatshirts, and pretended to be asleep when we got knocks at the door. The water that came out of the faucet was brown, so we didn't shower once that week. When asked what there was to do for fun, the creepy motel worker answered with well, I like to go out in to the desert, listen to music, drink, and shoot stuff. Drinking seemed to be a popular sport, because we found a huge pile of empty beer containers the size of the trash container itself sitting next to the dumpster in our motel. I have such found memories of being woken up to shooting in the not so far distance, trying to convince myself all the while that it was a car backfiring, and one morning a police officer came by to check on us. Apparently, my aunt had called the local police department concerned when she had wired me money to fix my car, and then didn't hear from me for several days. Looking back on it now, it's not such a far fetched scenario that she was picturing. For many years after that break down, my birthday present from my aunt was AAA, the gift that keeps on giving. Seems she has a sense of humor with her practicality.
It was from this trip that I learned that being polite is not more important than your life. At one point, my sister and I made the mistake of agreeing to a driving tour of the town with the creepy motel worker. We were trying to be polite after turning down many other "friendly" gestures from him. The moment we got in to the two door car, he informed us that the car forced him to be a gentleman, because the passenger seat door didn't open from the inside. I later learned that was one method a serial killer used to trap his victims. I can't say with certainty that this man was dangerous, but he sure did have me worried. He went on to tell us a quaint story about the time he got locked out of his car. He apparently had taken a giant, heavy frying pan and tried to break the glass. Pointing out a tiny scratch on his window of where he had tried to break the window only heightened my fear. My sister and I sighed with relief as the tour came to an apparent close and we headed back to the motel, only to find him passing the motel and heading out in to the desert. We wondered aloud where he was headed, and he responded, I thought we could listen to some music in the desert and stuff. Yes, that was exactly what we wanted to hear. Take us to the middle of nowhere, with your guns that you like to shoot things with, and hang out where our screams can't be heard. We panicked. We objected, and finally my sister blurted, I have to pee, can we please go back to the motel? At first he wasn't listening to our pleads to go back, but seemed to accept that one, because thankfully he took us back and let us out of the car.
When my car was finally fixed, we got the hell out of that town. We drove so fast, my sister ended up getting a speeding ticket before we managed to leave the state. Despite having poured a lot of money at the time into the car, it was a lemon and did not last for more than a few months after the breakdown. But, the memories of our breakdown will last a lifetime.
Thankfully, the news on Matt's car was good. Turns out the computer in his car needed a software update and the friendly folks at the Fargo dealership installed it for free. It put us back a little in our timing, but that was a best case scenario, all things considered. Thank goodness history is not repeating itself. Back on the road again!
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