TheBanyanTree: Our Trip

[Pam Lawley]

I was excited to get the invitation to a great friend’s surprise birthday
party in Ohio, and I determined that even though it was a few states away,
I wanted to be there!!  But when I asked my husband if he wanted to go with
me, his response was less than thrilled… it had momentarily slipped my
mind, that the 12-hour travel day would be HIS birthday, and that’s not
really how he wanted to spend it.  Nor did he want to spend that weekend
away from the golf course.  But he didn’t want me to have to go alone
either.  So I turned to my son who just happened to be sitting on the couch
(he’s usually holed up in his room!) and asked him how he felt about a road
trip – and he said he’d go!!



My son isn’t much for ‘road trips’.  They usually involve long hours in a
vehicle that he has to fold up in, and this trip would be no different!
He’s tall but mostly torso, and sitting up in my car causes his head to hit
the roof, and even with the seat pushed all the way back his knees are
still folded to his chest!  But – he’s been working two jobs without a
single 24-hour period off for months and months, and he was just desperate
enough for ANY excuse to get away – on mom’s dime!



Besides hating to ride in my car, he’s really not much of a ‘people
person’, and there he was agreeing to go to a party for somebody he didn’t
really know, surrounded by people he definitely didn’t know!   But it was
working for me and I was looking forward to spending a weekend with him!



He of course, found his own agenda!  He was going, but he was going to milk
it for all he could!  He told me the next day that, oh-by-the-way!, there
was a MLB game within an hour of our party destination.  As a baseball fan
myself, that one was easy to get suckered into, and for whatever the home
team’s reasons, we were able to get 2nd row seating for cheap – so we were
in!



Meanwhile, he told me he’d like to check out the ‘outlets’ on our way…



We left home about 6 o’clock that Friday  morning, a little later than I’d
hoped, but after I’d given  my husband his birthday presents and wished him
a good golf game!  J



Before we were even in the car, my son informed me that he was *hungry*!
His second job is ‘bouncing’ at a local bar on the weekends, and he’d
worked the night before, getting home around 3, ‘accidentally’ falling
asleep for a couple of hours, waking me, and then climbing into the car to
go back to sleep!  But he wanted me to stop for food.  “Where?”  Well, he’d
think about it.  Which he did with his eyes closed for a couple of hours!



When I came across some outlets about three hours into our trip, he was
ready to wake up, shop  and eat!  He’d climbed into the car without
showering, so when we stopped he asked me if we had any ‘hand sanitizer’.
I had a small bottle so I passed it to him, in the back where he’d been
laying down.  He started rubbing it all over himself, including in his
hair!  Since I had ‘wet wipes’ also, I passed those back as well.  He was
pulling clothes and toiletries out of his bag as he climbed out to change
pants and wet his hair (with a bottle of water I found under the seat) and
dry it with a dirty t-shirt.  Then he used the bottle of water to brush his
teeth…  I watched in amazement as he got himself ready for shopping, and
then in horror when I realized that the back of my car looked like his
bedroom!!



We stopped in the Coach outlet, and then we were onto Nike and Oakley…
Turns out that the neat stack of socks he’d made to pack were still sitting
on his bed and Nike was the only place we knew we’d be able to get more in
his size!  The shades were just so he’d look ‘cool’!  We only shopped in a
few places, and then it was onto Denny’s for breakfast, and then back on
the road.



The day continued on with stops to shop and eat, and that was why the trip
that the GPS calculated would take us about ten and a half hours ended up
taking us about sixteen!!    We didn’t hesitate to stop if some store
sounded inviting, and we ate well and coffee’d up at most gas stops!!



Our final stop that night was to a mall, and then dinner.  I called the
hotel to ensure them that we would be arriving eventually, and we piled
back into the car for the final leg.  It was late, it was dark, and I was
just a tad tired.  I love a good road trip, and I love driving, but I’m
finding nowadays that I’d just as soon drive in daylight!



The boy of course, went right to sleep sitting beside me.  I’d gotten off
the interstate and onto a two-lane road, and I swear I thought those last
two hours would never go by!!  About an hour into this last painful leg,
the boy woke up – not tired and cranky, not curious as to our location –
looked over at me and said, “You’re such a trooper.”



My son has a dry sense of humor and a very straight face.  But he can be so
friggin funny sometimes – and this was one of those times!   The very last
thing I expected was a compliment on my ability to just keep driving, and I
started laughing, and laughed until I was wiping away tears!!



Anyway, I drove.  I *love* to drive, especially on an interstate where I
can go faster!  (Sadly, I am so not a ‘scenic country roads’ kinda chick…)
I’ve driven the (an?) autobahn in Italy and got it up to about 145
‘klicks’, but that was as fast as I could go… It just seemed TOO fast to be
able to react!!  So, while I like to go fast, I don’t like to go TOO fast.
If you want to go faster, go on with your bad self.  Just stay out of my
way!  J  I guess I just want my own lane to go my own speed…



<sigh>  The problem – in my humble opinion! – seems to be that nowadays,
nobody knows the rules of the road!!!  Slower traffic should be in the
right lane (for those of us in the USA)!!!  If somebody comes up behind
you, get over!!!   Yeah, they might be going too fast, but it’s THEIR
ticket to get!  No, I’m not talking wildly reckless driving, weaving in and
out of lanes, I’m just talking going faster.  And people get in the left
lane and poke along at speeds UNDER the limit!!



It’s a control thing with me, I realize that.  Some jerk is controlling my
speed by sitting in front of me crawling along (especially if I can’t go
around the other way!!), and it just makes me nutz!!



Anyway, it’s not like I like a road trip to speed really fast.  I want to
set my cruise seven or eight miles over the limit, and I don’t want to have
to brake.  Is that SO much to ask!?!?  ;)



But I couldn’t do it in the mountains of West Virginia…  The posted limit
was 70 mph.  WT?!?!  Around those curves and up and down those hills –
SEVENTY!?!?  I was askeered to go that fast, let alone a few miles
over!!!!!!  Holy crap!!!  I was ‘white-knuckling’ it the whole way!  Going
around some of those turns felt like I was pulling a few ‘Gs’ – it was
crazy!!  I didn’t dare set the cruise, so I found my speed sometimes
drifting way lower than the limit!  (But not to worry – I was in the right
lane!!!!)



We finally got to our hotel about eleven that night, and I’m sure I’ve
never been so happy to see a place in my life!  Okay, maybe I’m
exaggerating – but I was *so* tired!  We got up to our rooms and started
spreading out our ‘stuff’.  Alright, my son started ‘spreading out’!  I’ve
travelled frequently for work through the years, and in my what I’ve
analyzed of myself to be a ‘need to please’, I make sure to only use one
towel and leave it hanging, and only one trashcan, and that everything that
should be IN the trashcan, is!  I work hard to ensure that the staff have
as little work as possible in my room so that when they leave they say,
‘Wow!  What a nice guest!’.  Yes, it’s a sickness!  My son’s reply to all
this?  ‘That’s what they get paid for!’  Brat!



I’d suggested that we might be able to get up Saturday and do ‘something’
before the party, but to my son’s disappointment, that didn’t happen.
Once we’d gotten up, showered, dressed and eaten, there was only a little
bit of time before my friend Julie was arriving!  *I* was antsy with
excitement!  While we’d driven up from North Carolina, she was coming from
Indiana, and we were meeting up to drive to the party location.



When she called to tell me she was in the garage waiting to take the
elevator to the lobby, I was standing in the lobby right in front of the
elevator!!!  She’s one of those friends I’ve met “on line”, and while we
are drastically different in our lives and lifestyles, she is a hero of
mine and someone I love dearly!!  I’m well aware that it was only through
the magic of modern technology that our paths crossed –and heck!, the same
is true of the friend whose birthday we were there to celebrate! – and it’s
one of those things in life I am most grateful for!  She has taught me so
much about this world, and myself!



Anyway – the doors opened and she was there, and I think we both
squealed!!  It was a moment of pure, unadulterated joy!!  J



I dragged her to our room, reintroduced her to my son (it’d been about ten
years since they’d last laid eyes on each other!), and we got her hair put
up to her satisfaction (I’d seen pictures of her newest ‘do’ and loved it,
her, not so much!), and then we were on the road.



Because she was leaving earlier to make the (six hour!) drive back home
that day, we decided we’d take both our vehicles, and she would follow me.
We knew where we were (the hotel), and the birthday girl’s daughter had
sent directions to her house – from some road.  We just didn’t know how to
get from the hotel to that road.  I asked the chick at the desk for
directions, and after some conferring with others on her part, she wrote
down a few turns that would get us where we needed to be.



Not.  Looking for the second turn, we immediately knew we were in the wrong
place, driving through a neighborhood.  We stopped and I went back to
discuss it with her, and a nice man out with his boys came over and gave us
new directions.   Meanwhile Julie plugged the party house address into her
GPS.



Now, one might wonder why we didn’t just do this to begin with, but we were
being directed to a neighboring park (to park!) that was close to the
house, but NOT the house.  (It was a surprise and all…)  We figured then if
we could find the house, perhaps we could work backwards and find the
park.  Julie’s GPS took us to a different neighborhood, but we still
weren’t there!  We stopped, conferred, and then decided to plug the address
into my more-recently-updated GPS and see what happened!   Finally, the
right address!!  And lo-and-behold – THERE was the park!  If we could only
just drive down that hill and across the soccer field we’d be there!



Then my son thought to pull up some cool tracking app on his iPhone that
would –hopefully! – show us where we were, and the roads to get us around,
and then back to the park.  By the time it loaded up though, we were on
roads and seeing markers that were written in the original directions and
even though I saw the turn, he said, ‘no! not yet!’, and I drove on by
while Julie turned in!  Haaaahahaa!!



We did a u-turn and finally managed to get to exactly where we needed to
be… original directions, two people, two GPSs and a phone app later!  We
parked, crossed the soccer field, walked up some steps and into the house
to introduce ourselves to friends and family who had never met us in our
lives!!  (Have I mentioned how much I love modern technology?!?!)



The party was a *huge* success, and the party girl who hates parties, LOVED
the love and attention, and a great time was had by all!!  Great food,
wonderful laughs, yummy cake, funny gifts, and a tearfully surprised
birthday chick!!  Definitely worth the trip!!!



And I was so proud of my son.  He was sociable and chatted with folks and
didn’t even once ask – ‘can we go now?!’.   Second nature to some us, hard
work to others who are almost painfully shy!  We took photos, gave our
hugs, and then we were on our way!



We tossed around the idea of visiting the Football Hall of Fame that was
close by, but the internet-on-the-phone revealed that we would be too
late.  So we decided to find a toy store!  Somewhere along the way, this
trip for a birthday party morphed into an occasion to have fun and make
memories for my son’s own upcoming 21st birthday!  (He has no desire to
celebrate {as so many kids do} by going out and having his first “official”
drink – he works as a bouncer at a bar thankyouverymuch, and he just has
little desire to make himself silly with alcohol.  Whatever.)



So I was pretty much up for any fun thing he wanted to do, or any ‘toy’ he
may have wanted.  And what he wanted was a giant Lego Star Wars set.  Okay,
so I did have limits!  I agreed to a smaller set, but then he was torn
between in and something else he really wanted that he’d found on line
earlier.  He was ‘hemming’ and ‘hawing’ trying to make a decision, and I
said something like, ‘you’ll never walk away from that’ and he took that as
a challenge and put it down and we walked out!



He did really want it but he was torn, so we sat in the car making deals
and laughing about it all!!  I have serious issues with the price of movie
theatre tickets.  I always have!  In my fifty-some years of life, I have
seen less than a dozen movies in a theatre.  I’ve always felt that I was
getting ripped off somehow.  Yeah, I know, it’s another sickness of mine!
I can blow money frivolously six ways to Sunday, but there’s just something
about a theatre!!  Except if I’m on ‘vacation’, and this trip classified
itself as just that.  I had told him we could go see a movie.



We just had to agree on one…  *I* wanted to see Titanic in 3D, he
absolutely hated the movie and did NOT want to see that one.  So I started
with deals and bribes, trying to get him to agree with me.  We finally
settled on something that I would buy him if he would go.  I can’t tell you
what it was because I’ve forgotten and he has never come back and reminded
me!!!  I just know that we laughed and laughed and I wiped away tears
before it was all settled!!  Then we went to the movies, I paid something
obscene for tickets, we donned our 3D glasses, and I was entertained again
with Rose and Jack!



And then it was back to the hotel, and sleep!  The baseball game was an
hour more north, and it started at one.  The park opened at eleven and he
wanted to be there then to watch batting practice.  I told him we’d need to
be checked out and on the road by about 9:30.  But when we got up the next
morning, he again suggested the Hall of Fame.  He said it probably wouldn’t
take more than an hour to tour, and if we were there when they opened at
nine, an hour looking wouldn’t put us that much farther behind and he could
still see some batting practice.



I hate to sound rude, but we were not very impressed with the Hall of
Fame.  They are actually under construction to enlarge the joint, and I
think they’re overdue!  Football in the USA of HUGE – millions and millions
of dollars flying around the sport.  But he HOF was so… outdated?  In this
fast-paced world of technology, it’s just so… so… 70’s!  Cardboard photos
that are peeling around the edges… ‘Push-the-button’ displays that are out
of order… I guess one could say that we were kind of bored with it…  The
busts themselves were cool to see – but really nothing worth the
twenty-plus dollars each to get in!!  Not sure where the NFL is spending
all that money, but it wasn’t there!



Oh well – we went and have the magnet to prove it!  J



And then we were off to the baseball game!!!  Ya-hoo!!  Major League
Baseball in the flesh!!  Two teams we didn’t really care a lick about – but
real live baseball!!!  It was cold and windy and dreary and overcast.  We
had jackets, but once we’d entered the park, we realized that we were going
to freeze to death sitting there!!



So, these two huge baseball fans with THREE different sized blankets in the
car, went into a gift shop and frivolously blew a wad on another one –
decorated with a team that wasn’t our favorite!  THAT is how I like to blow
money!!  :D



We enjoyed the game…  We sat under our over-priced blanket eating WAY
over-priced ballpark food and watched strike outs and home runs with the
home team fans!!  Well worth the trip!



According to the GSP, because we’d added another hour north to the trip, it
would take us about eleven and a half hours to get home.  Because I was
*SO* nervous about the mountains in the dark, I told him that we *really*
needed to be on the road by four.  Surely they could play a game in three
hours?!!?  (Noting that just the night before we left home this same team
played a game that went SIXTEEN innings!!!!)  But at the top of the 9th,
with the home team ahead and only three outs to go, we decided it was a
done deal and we could leave.



We stopped at the restrooms on our way out and saw on the overhead TVs that
the home team had made an awful error and the game might just drag on, but
as we walked toward the car we heard a loud roar and figured that they’d
just won.  (We checked on line later – they had!!)



And so we hit the road at about 3:30.  We got gas and I got coffee, and
then the stops were few!  I figured I could stop when it was dark!!  Didn’t
want to waste daylight if I didn’t have to!  I kept up with the traffic on
the straightaways going a little faster than I would have on cruise, but it
got it got us to the mountains with more daylight in front of us.  Not a
lot, but enough!



And, after all my angst, I found that the mountains weren’t nearly as
treacherous the second time!  I still didn’t use the cruise, but I found it
a little easier to at least do the speed limit!!  And while I also feared
being tired around midnight, I had no problems staying awake or seeing, and
we pulled up in our driveway right at 3 o’clock the next morning!
Easy-peasy!!



I got a few hours sleep and went into work late – and a new week started
and our trip was done.  I’d found myself ‘writing’ in my head during the
drive.  I didn’t have the radio on much so I wouldn’t have to hassle with
finding new stations, and I was perfectly content to entertain my brain
while the boy slept!  I wrote colorfully and smoothly during the drive!  My
words came alive and reader could feel the pull of the Gs!!



But then, back home in front of my laptop – nothing!  It was such a fun few
days and we had so many laughs, I just wanted to put it on paper!!  I
wanted to recreate every minute and every laugh and every memory.  Alas -
this is what I got!!  (I really should carry a portable recorder around
with me!)


Pam