1. Your daughter, age 18, can drive the entire trip.
2. Your son, age 14 (with his learner's permit) can offer to drive the entire trip.
3. You sit in the backseat and smile because it's your daughter and not you (face tense, eyes wide, and fingers - white from clenching onto the seat) instructing your 14-year-old son while he drives.
4. Your son gets bored after 40 miles of driving in Nebraska and pulls over on the interstate as semi-trucks whiz by, so close and so fast, they shake the little Kia you are sitting in
5. Your daughter swears, and then she swears your son will never drive her car again becuase he drove for hours. She swears again that those 40 miles were the longest of her life.
6. You sit in the backseat and read your online graduate class assignment, or pretend to read it, while your teenage childen argue, and your 18-year-old daughter drives because you always get a headache when they argue, and your teenage children always scare you when they drive.
7. When you pull off the interstate for gas it costs twice as much to fill up as the last time you drove to California, but you hand your daughter a fifty and get ready to sleep, or try to sleep, because it's almost dark and your teenage children always scare you when they drive, especially when it's dark.
8. You are grateful you took this same trip so many times that you know it's shorter to take the business route through towns in Wyoming. The business route takes you through the town and right back to the interstate.
9. Fifteen miles after you got off the interstate, you swear they changed the interstate in Wyoming because it's dark and the business route hasn't taken you right back to the interstate on the other end of the town.
10. Your daughter swears, and then she swears she will always get back to the interstate the way she got off. Then she swears again that she will never, ever to listen to your directions again.
11. Still on the "business route" it's dark, and you come to a town with a population of 250. Your 14-year-old son announces that, " WE'RE LOST!" You calmly inform your children you will ask directions in the bar and you know there is a bar in this town because you've been on this same trip many times before (actually, it's becuase you know that towns with 250 people always have a bar).
12. Once back in the car you assure your teenage children that it's just as you told them, it's only a few more miles back to the interstate; both people in the bar said so. Your 14-year-old son confesses that he was scared when you were in the bar because it's dark outside, and he has always been afraid of the dark. Then he lets you know again that, "IT'S DARK OUTSIDE!"
13. You find the interstate, you feel your teenage children sigh with you, and you calmly announce that, see you knew we weren't lost - afterall you've taken this trip a million times before - and somehow it took you 1 and a half hours to go through that Wyoming town on the business route.
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Grateful, that your teenage children are sleeping and it's quiet, you go into the brick building where the restrooms are, lay your sweatshirt on the cold tile floor, sit down on your sweatshirt, and actually do read your assigned reading. You try to ignore the looks from other weary travelers as they enter the building, look at the universal signs for "men" and "women" on restroom doors, and enter the room with their "sign." It's so quiet and your eyes are so heavy that you almost drift off to.......
The outside door swings open and your 14-year-old son enters and announces, "WE'VE BEEN HERE TWO HOURS" and " MALIA SAYS IT'S TIME TO GO, SHE WANTS TO GET THERE.'
And we're "Back on the Road Again..."
'til next time
jamminsoul
