The Driving Vacation

We recently went to Florida. We drove. Plane fares were high. You know so let's take the family vacation and drive. This goes all the way back to when I was a kid and we took driving vacations across the country. Fond memories of being in the back of a station wagon with dad driving and mom navigating What fun! So we begin. The drive immediately asserts itself as an exercise of interminable boredom. That is what you forget. That there is absolutely nothing to do for twenty three hours. Except to eat.

And we ate. McDonalds. Panera. Burger King. Every gas station under the sun where we bought just about every thing they had to offer. And then you sit in your electric chair and don't move. I drive and drive and drive. The landscape is interesting for a while and then it is not. It is just scenery to the brain thudding exercise of driving a car down a road with trucks and cars and people honking and cutting you off. What fun!

And the car becomes a rolling garbage truck. Amazing the amount of garbage such a trip can produce. But we start to fill up and have to unload at every stop and fill fifty five gallon drums with  our fast food detritus. And then we get close and push through and by now you are bleary eyed and bloated from sitting and eating for two days. You have come to hate the capsule you have been stuck in for two days and swear never ever to do this again.

And when you arrive you feel like a voyager who has reached a distant planet. You will never do this again. NO more Wallyworld. No more Chevy Chase in Vacation. You are done. Sure you are.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Driving Through the Blizzard of 2011

The blizzard in Chicago assures you that you will be going nowhere. But you push it anyway and end up being the last man out of the coffee house that every sensible person left hours ago. Didn't you hear? Sixteen inches! Worst storm in history! Yeah Yeah Yeah. Let me finish this scene and I'll be along. But you do notice you can't see out the windows anymore and even the toothless guy in the zip up suit guys at Jiffy Lube wear looks concerned. She's going to be a doozie he says nodding. You wonder where he has to go because you can't stay in Starbucks forever. Mr. Starbucks the revolutionary studying theology goes out the door and comes back in giving up on the smoke. It's getting bad he declares to the toothless guy in the zoot suit and the writer in the scarf balancing the laptop. Morons I'm sure.

So head it home. The SUV can handle this. But where are all the cars and why are the only cars out off the road? Why is the guy in the middle of the road with his flashers on the hill? Could it be he cant get up the hill occurs to you as you rumble past. But now things are getting bad. You just cant see. The world has turned white like one of those car washes that freaks you out with blankets of suds and the claustrophobia grabs you by the throat making you consider driving through the car wash door to get the hell out of there. But there is no door to drive through because you cant tell up from down or right from left. You instantly win the Sarah Palin award for pushing everything once again to the limit. DUMMMMMMMMB

But like a pilot flying through clouds you guess where the road should be. You have driven it a million times and there are dim lights pulsing through the white haze that must be a car in front of you so you key on that. Keep the nose on the dim lights. You are now a sailor aiming for a lighthouse in the far distance. The light pulses and moves away and you push down on the accelerator. Lose that light and you really are doomed. So you inch along passing more cars off the road with misty figures standing by the side. You cant stop. If you stop the guy behind you who is also blind will ram right into you. Oh and by the way, you didn't fill up and your CHECK GAUGE light has just come on.

Now you are risking your life for coffee in Starbucks and reading an extra article in the New York Times. Run out of gas on this desolate road and you are just done. Oh and the cellphone needs charging too. Perfect. The complete moron. You really should call up to Alaska and ask if they need a campaign manager because you have out Palined the Palinator. Now that the road has vanished and the wheel is vibrating in your hand because there is just as much as snow on the road as off the road you consider your fate. Snowbank death. Turned over vehicle death. Frozen death. The wheels do not like the snow pushing back and of course you have no idea where you are and the gas gauge is screaming you are on fumes. You simply don't have any landmarks anymore and so you don't know how far you have to go.

You pick up the cellphone blinking BATTERY LOW. You dial the wife. Might as well do a Scott and Amundsen thing with a final I love you. They will bring that up at your funeral. If only he left the Starbucks earlier. Every one will shake their head: moron. You press send and the phone shuts down. No final epistle: I believe I could have made it if I put another mile behind me. So you are alone in your folly. Moron Moron Moron. The blinding howling wind taunts you in your capsule. You give in to the inevitable sputtering engine that is making strange noises. Then...like Shackleton's sighting of the whaling station after being lost for two years...the light appears.

That is the light on the corner of the road to your neighborhood. LAND HO! You knew you could do it! You turn in and glide down toward your home, cheating death, cheating the great blizzard of 2011. Sarah Palin will have to find another man. You pull into your garage and wait until the door is safely down and you sit contemplating the cosmos and your small place in it. Moron you mutter.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off soon