Did I mention we drove? Yes, we did. The four of us, in my small (US) / large (UK) RAV4. All the way there and back. Apart from when we crossed over to Nantucket of course. Four thousand miles and all I’ve ever done is describe what was happening outside the car. Amends shall be made. Immediately!
Firstly the children, for we shall start in the back. My goodness they were well behaved. Say what you like about them, and I do, but they are portable chaps and no mistake. Yes, they inconveniently asked to stop occasionally, insisting that they needed a bathroom, or a meal or a bed for the night, but bless them they did not utter a single “Are we there yet?” at any point. Okay, their noses were often pressed firmly against the screens of their Nintendo DSes, but they were happy to play with the volume turned down and we only had to cope with two vomits, both from William. Did you know there’s a variety of Febreeze just for cars? Marvellous stuff. Every now and then we would cross a river or a mountain range, or drive past Manhattan or the White House and we’d shout “Quick boys, look out your window!”
“Ooooh, that’s pretty,” Chris would call enthusiastically, sometimes without even looking up.
When they weren’t playing video games they would sit and play some imaginary thing with their teddies. For hours. It required special accents for some reason but I was trying not to pay attention. Another game they played used Marvel action heroes, supplied by Happy Meals we collected along the way. We soon almost had a full set but, bless, they didn’t know any of their names (we’re more of a DC household). So they made them up, a mixture of shrewd guesses (USA Man), wild fantasy (Mr Rock) and scrambled mis-rememberings (The Incredible Lump - often beautifully garbled by Chris to The Inedible Lump.)
Best of all, they weren’t fazed at all by the thought that we might, for example, spend the next seven hours driving. It hasn’t occurred to them that we might have been asking anything special of them and we took full advantage of this.
Meanwhile, what was happening in the front of the car? Well, apart from the Maintenance Required light coming on after only 500 miles, one wrong turn in the dark outside Philadelphia and the small matter of having to repeatedly park the damn thing in central DC it was all pretty un-stressful. Though, seeing as I did most of the driving, Laura may remember it differently. I found a lot of the journeys to be almost effortless, as if the road offered no resistance. It merely stretched ahead, frictionless, and we would drive and drive until the tank was all but empty, stop, fill up and then carry on, never having to change gear, hardly needing to steer.
On looooooooong journeys I did dabble with the Cruise Control, but I didn’t like it. Automatic transmissions may force the driver away from conscious control of a vehicle, compared with manual stick-shifts, but Cruise Control is altogether a step too far for me. My main complaint is (of course!) how everyone else drives. Some Americans seem to whack on the CC and close their eyes perhaps, resolutely sticking at one speed and in one lane for hundreds of miles. And this is fine until two of them end up side by side, or until Truck A travelling at 60.00 mph has to pull out to avoid going into the back of Truck B, doing 59.99 mph, and the two of them proceed to block the entire road until the former has finally and almost imperceptibly inched past the latter. Nobody seems interested in overtaking quickly and cleanly, or in taking the effort to regulate their speed themselves. At least undertaking is allowed here, and that helped somewhat with occasional frustration.
The only other remarkable thing about US highways that I can remember right now is the unusual but striking roadkill that litters the hard shoulders and the verges. Not buffalo, or alligators or armadillos, but tyres.
All across America, on nearly every road we used, we saw countless rubber remains. Shredded, exploded tatters of tyre everywhere. On some highways there’d be some every mile. It seemed very odd. Presumably they came from blow outs, but you’d think – given our mileage – that we’d have a statistically significant chance of observing the phenomenon ourselves if that were true. I did see one guy changing a wheel on the roadside, but his old tyre was still intact as I zoomed past. And then once, in Alabama I think, I saw an old guy in a high-vis jacket walking back along the verge picking up debris. I couldn’t resist the notion that this was his job, to slowly pace along all the highways of America, endlessly picking up the blasted bits of rubber.
For all I know he may have been leaving it there.
Some Recent Statistics:
- 90,000 mile service due: er.., somewhere around the Mississippi/Alabama border?
- Total photographs taken on holiday: 2019
- Additional fridge magnets found at bottom of suitcase: 1
- Revised total number of fridge magnets bought: 7
- Number of North Dakota plates seen since we returned to Houston: 2
- Number of active hurricanes/tropical storms in the Atlantic: 3
- Days since school re-started: 6
- Pages of homework completed by William: 8
- Next destination: Chicago, IL.
- Days until next trip: ...er, 12!
This made me laugh.
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