Road Trips

Sometimes road trips sound like fun.  Like when you're with a group of friends and someone says "We should just drive to Vegas!"  Or, "Let's go to California! ROAD TRIP!"  That sounds enjoyable, except we never actually do it.  Sadly, my experiences with road trips are not exactly a party.

My dad's side of the family lives in Washington state, which is basically as far away as possible from Ohio.  Lots of people don't know where Ohio is, so I'll draw you a map of how freaking far apart they are.

I would just like to add that I drew this free-handed on my computer.  So yeah.

Sometimes we would fly to Washington, but we've driven there a few times also.  Basically you have to do two 14 hour days of straight driving to get there.  And I didn't even drive back then.  I just sat in the back sleeping, eating, and watching movies the whole time.  Now I'm older and I still want to do all those things, but I don't get to.  I'm still not sure why.

Anyway, last week Jenai and I drove from Utah to Washington to meet up with family there.  I was going to be gone during the check-out day for my apartment, so I had to move out a week early.  Which means I packed all night, went to bed at 3am, and then woke up at 6am to clean.  The plan was to hit the road at 9am, we left at 11.  Whatever, we made good time and arrived at my grandparents' in eleven hours. 

Although we arrived in eleven hours instead of the planned thirteen, it still felt like forever.  Both Jenai and I were running on hardly any sleep, and I felt guilty every time I took a little nap.  Those guilty feelings didn't last very long because after a few hours, Jenai asked me to take over the wheel.  No problem right?  Sure, if I could drive stick shift -- Which I can't -- At least not well (remember this post)?  Yeah, so I woke up with Jenai pulling off onto a road in the middle of nowhere asking me if I could drive.  I was out of it, so I just said, "Uh...sure."  Never mind I hadn't driven stick in over a year, and quite badly at that.  It was all ok though.  I didn't stall getting into first gear and then it was easy sailing in 5th on the highway.

A good thing to remember while driving in the west is there aren't many stops, and when there are, you better get gas.  So we stopped at a lot of gas stations.  A lot of crappy gas stations.  We had to stop in some town in Idaho and the pump was so ancient, Jenai had to ask how to use it.

Yeah, you pump that gas.

The picture is kind of blurry because our windshield was covered with dead bugs.

Then we made it into Oregon and apparently they have gas attendants who pump your gas for you.  (Because it's really hard to do it yourself).  Of course we didn't realize this, so when the creepy guy with the long hair walked up to our car we thought he was going to do something much worse than pump our gas.

It's probably creepier that I took a picture of him.

 Road trips can be exciting when  you see the landscape change.  We definitely saw a change out of Utah's mountains.  The majority of the drive looked like this:

 It was really exciting.  We did get to drive through Seattle and the mountain pass so it was pretty for a little bit.

But not for long.  We entertained ourselves by listening to music and then Tina Fey's Bossypants.  I'm pretty sure I've listened to that audiobook five times now.  I love her.

Then we drove through this swampy place and our windshield got even more disgusting.  So many bugs were hitting the car it sounded like it was raining.  Oh gosh, it was so gross.

Another fun thing about road trips is all the junk food you bring to snack on.  I had just moved out, so I didn't have any food and Jenai didn't either.  We stopped at a gas station and I bought a big bag of trail mix and some chex mix.  And that was what I ate for lunch and dinner.  So much trail mix.

Then we got there safe and sound.  The end.