Dad: How are you going to survive three days without the internet?
Me: Har har.
What I was really thinking: Well I already set up my blog to autopost and we’ll probably be able to get free wifi at the hotels, or at the very least at McDonald’s.
I have a problem.
Anyway, let’s just hope we make it to Seattle in one piece. Hopefully we won’t see conditions like this. But if anything interesting happens while I’m not driving, I’ll tweet it. And when I’m driving, I’m sure Mark will be tweeting our spiraling descent into insanity.
What’s your best/funniest/most horrifying road trip story?
My funniest road trip story is when I drove through the Yellow Stone and Teton National Park, it snowed in mid-June. I had to sleep in my car because there is no room available in the hotels around the area. It was horrifying and fun.
Well, way back in the dim mists of the past (ie, 1986), my medieval group went on a road trip from Canberra to the annual convention in Maldon, Victoria. It would have been about a 9-hour drive with two people in a car.We hired a 16-seater minibus for the trip, ripped out four seats, and still fit 18 people plus all their gear. The trip took about thirteen hours. It was… um… an interesting trip.
I don’t know if Ottawa – Toronto really counts as a road trip, but it’s definitely my most horrifying story.So me and a few friends take two cars and drive to Toronto to see an awesome musical (Evil Dead: The Musical). After the show, one of our local friends wants a ride back to the university. Being an All Around Nice Guy™, I said that I would give her a ride.After dropping her off, and getting on the 401, my car got caught in a horrendous rain storm. Like, torrential downpour, crazy winds, and, since it was about 11:00 at night, pitch black. Fantastic. So I pull off at a rest stop, thinking I’ll wait out the storm. Ten minutes later, it clears up. “Hooray”, I said. Two minutes of driving later, the storm is back. Well, shit. I’m driving with the storm. So I do one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever done in my life. I raced the storm. I outran it, as it were. This means doing 120 km/h on a 100 km/h stretch of dark, slippery road, littered with 18-wheelers. I made it out okay, and got home on time.The punchline? The other car made it home bone dry. I guess no good deed goes unpunished.
Two buddies and I drove down to Virginia Beach (from MA) in a 1974 VW bus. It was quite the adventure.We got a flat tire on the Jersey Turnpike. Let me tell you the Jersey Turnpike is the Bermuda Triangle of roads.http://laughinginpurgatory.blo…
My latest road trip was pretty eventful. After setting off from Monterey California, I was propositioned by a gay, grizzled old firefighter in Reno. Some fellow heathens and I forced the hotel bartender to stay open until the wee hour of 11:30 on a Sunday night in Salt Lake City. I met Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame in Cheyenne Wyoming. I met a reggae band in a bar in Des Moines Iowa and went to their show. I met an Anthoney Bourdain look-alike in Chicago who claimed to have been a speech writer for President Clinton and who got me into some underground bar without having to pay a cover so we could see a Brazilian band that was playing there. In Cleveland I got into a bar argument with Cleveland sports fans about both Lebron James and Art Model. I also witnessed some bees getting drunk on Meyers rum and Jeremiah Weed at an open air bar near the baseball stadium. Finally, I hung out with my brothers in NJ/NY and ate the “Original Sloppy Joe” (nothing like the cafeteria style one) in South Orange New Jersey before ending my trip in Baltimore.
Jen’s a loner, Mark…a rebel.
Lots of turnpike rest areas have wifi now. It’s awesome. I was at a rest area in Ohio with some friends on the way to a conference and stopped to check immigration rules to see if our Chinese car-mate could go into Canada when we stopped at Niagra Falls. We had to stay on the American side. She could go in, but they wouldn’t have let her back into the States. Dumb laws.Best road trip story (and one that will reveal my true identity if anyone I actually know reads this): My employer sent us out in a 26 ft Mack box truck from Norfolk, VA to Chicago with Mapquest directions and hotel reservations, back when directions online were really bad, and the directions dumped us off the interstate right in the middle of downtown Washington DC. Fortunately I had brought a stack of maps along and had a co-pilot. I handed off the stack of maps to her and she dug through until she found one with DC on it, I just drove along shouting out street names until she found us on the map. There was no where to pull over a 26 ft truck, and we ended up on a street so narrow that we each had to lean out of our windows to make sure we cleared the parked cars. We made it with about an inch on either side. Finally got back on the highway and made it into Ohio, where we had a reservation at a hotel in Maumee (near Toledo). By 2 am we were over driving and decided to scrap the reservation and pull off at the next exit with hotels listed. We did and checked into our hotel. In the morning I looked around and the hotel we had a reservation at was across the street. But the exit name on the directions had not been on any exit signs. We never would have stopped if we insisted on following the directions to our reserved hotel.On the way back we had to stop at a makeshift weigh station in a rest stop in Pennsylvania. I was so confused by it that I hadn’t stopped and a cop flagged us down. We had to back in the exit to the rest area. They conducted an inspection and everything was looking golden. Then they said: we just need to see your driver’s log book and your health certificate. My what? My boss said we didn’t need that. Your boss was wrong. Oops! Since I didn’t have a log I was not allowed to drive the truck for 8 hours. They let my copilot drive though. I don’t think they though she would do it. Unfortunately she was short and had to stand on the clutch to get in in gear. We got on the highway and she said: We’re not stopping. I’m not dealing with shifting gears again, find a route that keeps us on interstate all the way and keeps us out of DC traffic. So I found an alternate route through West Virginia and we drove from Pennsylvania to Norfolk without stopping for anything. Six hours without even slowing down enough to come out of high gear. That was exciting.Later that year the same employer wanted to send me to New Jersey in the truck. I said, look I need a health certificate and a log book so you need to send me to the doctor for a physical and buy the book. No, they said, we looked into it, you don’t need that. I’m pretty sure the highway patrol in Pennsylvania disagrees with you. I looked it up too, and the highway patrol is right. Well, I went anyway. No skin of my nose, the employer pays the fine and there are no points assessed for failure to keep a log. Low and behold I got inspected in Salisbury, MD and asked to present a health certificate and driver’s logbook. I had no co-pilot and called back to see if they wanted to send someone up to drive the truck the rest of the way or what. They weren’t interested in doing anything. So after sitting through a two hour lecture on interstate commercial vehicle rules, I walked up to the last exit where there was a mall, watched a couple of movies, ordered the most expensive food at Ruby Tuesday’s and tipped very well. When my eight hours were up I walked back in the dark and drove the truck to the next truck stop where I bought a drivers log book before driving home (it was too late for my mission in New Jersey since it would be the weekend before I arrived and I wouldn’t be able to do any business). So for want of sending me for a physical and buying a logbook my employer paid a $250 fine, bought me a relatively expensive dinner and paid for two movies. Plus they paid a late fee on equipment return and paid the gas for a round trip to Salisbury, MD for nothing.I laugh every time I pass Salisbury. And whatever happens in a car, just remember it could be worse, you could be in a 26 ft Mack truck with a cranky transmission.
Laziness says ‘Post this old radio essay’. I say ‘OK’. http://howlandbolton.com/essay…For one reason or another, and very much like most of the people alive today, I don’t remember the sixties at all! But …but just occasionally a memory will surface to bask in the light of consciousness for a while, or maybe they are all merely flashbacks.One of these flashed back into my ken the other morning while I was out running and found myself easily out-running a police car. A police car, that was, that had already stopped some poor unfortunate in an actual vehicle; and all in a flash I remembered ‘The Famous Trip to Brighton’—Brighton in England, that was; and that was in the summer of ’69, or perhaps that honourary member of the sixties 1970, and I was living in Putney, and possibly in Sin too (remember this was the sixties) down by the river; with an Australian Girlfriend we all called Die-eeyan , in vague and probably insulting approximation of the way she said it; and, intermittently, a few others of varying sex (well remember this WAS the sixties). And very early one morning (or extremely late the previous night) we suddenly decided that we should all go down to the seaside at Brighton in the newly acquired old, battered and rusty van that someone had just, um, acquired–and then decorated in the most florally psychedelic of fashions (remember this was the sixties). I was designated Driver (on the wholly unreasonable grounds that I was the one with the driving licence[1]) and an indeterminate number of passengers crowded on board as we started our trip on the quite desolate and very early morning (or extremely late night) streets of south London.The first time we were stopped by the police we had been traveling for a mere half-an-hour …-ish and had hardly left the built-up bits of London.The fuzz, plural, got out of their fuzzmobile (remember this was the sixties) and subjected us and our van to a rather thorough and torch-enhanced[2] examination, tallying up infractions at great and detailed length. These were, no doubt, the sort of infractions that cause acute myocardial infarction in bureaucrats in the Ministry of Transport but are of absolutely no consequence anywhere else except, of course, for the pounds, shillings and pence[3] symbols that were clicking up in the eyes of the fuzz and the minds of us their victims—when suddenly the fuzzmobile’s radio crackled and one of them went to it and quickly returned to his colleague to drag him away leaving us with the admonishment that we were lucky they had some real work to do—which rather put us into our perspective-challenged place, and confirmed my suspicions that they were acting less out of concern for public safety than out of boredom.The second time we were stopped, just as the Sun was ari-ising (as they put it in all the better Folk songs), was much more business-like and we even got a ticket for having less than optimal tyres[4] (and felt lucky to get no more than that).Then, just as we were a-enteri-i-ing Brighton (as even the worst Folk songs don’t put it) we made our hat-trick! Stopped three times in a fiftyish mile journey!! This time, though we had what amounted to a passport, and waving our ticket at the nice fuzz, we got off without adding to its number.Strange as it may seem I don’t remember anything at all of our day at the beach, but as we were leaving Brighton for the journey home we picked up a couple of hitch-hikers, as one did (remember this was the sixties) and, as we were regaling them with our tales of the fuzz-thronged roads, I (still lumbered with the driving, poor me) spotted a police car on the other side of the dual carriageway[5] (which is what we in our elegant English way call a divided highway[6]). Jokingly I said “Hey! there’s number four.”—jokingly, and as it turned out prophetically, because the fuzz went to all the trouble of driving down to the next roundabout to turn round and come after us. By the time they had caught up with us and stopped us we were all laughing hysterically, helplessly, as luck would have it pathetically.“Well?” he said as I wound down my window.“I’m really sorry officer, but this is the fourth time we’ve been stopped.”He stepped back, giving a scathing perusal to our poor van—rusty, battered but (at least in intention) brightly psychedelic; and our pathetic but still laughing selves, … and paused.“Well what the f____[7] do you expect!”And walked back to his carCheerio for nowfromRichard Howland-BoltonNotes:The title is from the well-known children’s song ‘wanna go riding in my Car, Car’.The words (at least as I learned them) include:Horn goes ‘Beep! Beep!’Horn go-oes ‘Beep! Beep!’The horn goes ‘Beep! Beep!’Riding in my car. …Breaks go-o ‘Screech! Screech!’ ( X 3 )…Pedestrian goes ‘Squelch! Squelch!’ ( X 3 )Run over by my car…Policeman goes ‘’ello, ’ello, ’ello!’ …Magistrate goes ‘Tut! Tut!’… etc.It can be extended or interpolated ad libitumGlossary/Notes:1 licence: that’s ‘license’ to you Mercans2 torch-enhanced: that’s ‘flashlight-enhanced’ to you Mercans3 pounds, shillings and pence: that’s ‘dollars and cents’ to you Mercans4 tyres: that’s ‘tires’ to you Mercans5 dual carriageway: that’s ‘divided highway’ to you Mercans6 divided highway: that’s … Oh! Never mind.7 f___: Taboo usage presents a difficult dilemma to the more sensitive broadcaster; after all I’m reporting speech, and doing so accurately as far as I remember (see the opening para of the essay), and further I think the fabled F-word works artistically in context: but, chicken as the broadcasting industry is, I felt i just HAD to de-uck this for the on-air version ’cause, of course, we need the eggs. You can hear the whole thing in all its fucking glory on-line. [just let your mouse dwell for a moment or two on my daughter Rowie’s ear, next to the title on that page.]
I don’t know if it counts as a road trip, but it’s a funny story anyway:My fiancée (girlfriend at the time) and I were going to school in Fredonia, NY, and driving to Buffalo to see George Carlin perform (which was awesome, BTW). It’s about an hour drive from Fredonia. So she is driving down Rte. 90, behind a big tractor trailer in the right lane. All of a sudden, the truck starts to turn off onto the shoulder, and we’re wondering what he’s doing. Apparently, a deer ended up on the highway, and the trucker couldn’t get out of its way, because from underneath the truck rolls out this deer carcass, with no head or legs; just the torso rolling out directly at our car. I look over at the girlfriend, and she has the classic “Oh Shit” face on, because there’s no way she’s going to be able to get out of the way of this thing. I’m thinking this thing is going to wreck our car. As it comes towards us, she hits the gas, and we power over this dead deer like it was a speedbump in the middle of the NY Thruway. I was actually quite impressed with her; I doubt I would have collected myself in time to accelerate as a deer is rolling towards the car. We both look at each other in shock, waiting to see if the car doesn’t anything strange. It seems fine, so we decided to keep going to Buffalo. So we get to Buffalo, and have to park our car in one of the pay lots near the theater. I get out to check the car, and it looks fine, other than the deer blood and guts hanging from the front bumper and under-carriage. The guy comes over to collect the money for parking, and you can tell he sees the carnage on the front of our car, but doesn’t say a word. The look on his face was quite funny though. In retrospect, I wish I had said something like “Make sure she doesn’t get scratched” or something equally stupid, but I didn’t have the presence of mind at the time.In the end, the car was perfectly fine. We had to scrape deer guts off the front of it, and get it washed the next day. And I learned that if I’m in the middle of the road, odds are my fiancée would most likely hit the gas and power over me :-).
Ooh, I’ve got one. It wasn’t a very long road trip, certainly not by US standards (I’m in the UK)** – we’d gone from Devon to Cornwall with a group, using a 16(?)-seater minibus and my six-seater car. My engine had had a bit of trouble beforehand, basically running rough when cold, especially in wet weather. On the way back from this trip, that trouble escalated, it kept running incredibly rough and losing power badly. I had six people plus luggage in the car, taking a route with some interesting gradients. I barely got up some of the hills, I was literally being overtaken by tractors and 50cc scooters! Amazingly we made it the 100 or so miles home, pretty much standing on the accelerator and most likely redlining the engine the whole time to get it to move at all (it doesn’t have a rev counter in the dashboard so I don’t know exactly). Took the car to the garage and it turns out two of the fuel injectors were faulty (of a four-cylinder engine – so basically running on half the engine…?). Surprisingly, after swapping the injectors, there was no other damage to the engine and it’s done about 15,000 miles since that incident.** though I do go on longer drives than most people in the UK fairly commonly, as I live in the UK and my family are in continental Europe. In fact, I drove 550 miles only yesterday. In the car this story is about.
Oh, and because I’m curious about inconsequential detail: What sort of car do you drive, Jen? (And everyone else, too!)Mine’s a dark blue Fiat Multipla (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F….You can stop laughing now. *I* like it, thank you very much.
Drove across Newfoundland, took the ferry across to Cape Breton Island, and landed after the restaurants had all closed unless I wanted to drive to Halifax. This was long before 24-hour business hours along highways; wasn’t much of a highway then, either. I finally found a motel with a room available, but we had to eat vending machine food for dinner. Oh, did I mention that I had my 5 year old and dog in the car? The dog ate kibble as usual. Five year olds don’t sleep well after eating candy bars and chips for dinner. Or recently, on a road trip home from dance camp, it was my turn to drive my friend’s older car that he hoped to trade in at the end of the summer. Blew out the engine right there on the interstate. He had said that the check-engine light had been on for the last day or so, but he thought it would be OK. We phoned the other car in the caravan and we all pulled over. State trooper pulled up just as we were all laughing hysterically and making up dances about the situation. He seemed to decide that the mostly-middle-aged lot of us probably weren’t on drugs and helped us find a tow truck.The really scary trip was during the snow storm on I90 between Erie and Buffalo when all I could do was follow the taillights in front of me and hope. Pulling off didn’t seem wise as I couldn’t tell where the side of the road was or if we’d be under a snow bank and not be found before it thawed. The toll booth guy at the end told us that we were “just about the last”.