On the road again and never happier
Unlike Little Miss Sunshine or the Eagles, one intrepid reporter’s trip ended perfectly
If you’ve ever seen the movie Little Miss Sunshine, you know some family road trips are less like a vacation and more like a mission.
In the 2006 film, a dysfunctional family, including a suicidal uncle and a heroin-addicted, porn-loving grandfather, takes off across the country in a worn-out VW bus to enter the young daughter in a Little Miss California beauty pageant she has no chance of winning.
In our case, five relatively sane, albeit crazy-busy adults would leave jobs, dogs and significant others to attend a wedding in one city, a high school graduation in another, a college graduation in another and six related parties, dinners and receptions spanning more than 5,000 kilometres in less than two weeks.
With expected appearances in six cities at nine events requiring nine wardrobe changes and 11 load-andunloads of the minivan, we would be a band on the run, Little Miss Sunshine of the East, like the Eagles on tour, only without benefit of roadies.
“Do you think we can pull this off?” said my husband, who had of late been looking a lot like Don Henley. “We have to,” I said. Just like Olive’s parents had to get her to the pageant on time and the Eagles had to play Madison Square Garden, we had to see our eldest child receive his master’s degree some 650 kilometres away from our Ohio home, in Baltimore.
Likewise, we couldn’t miss my husband’s only brother’s first-born son’s wedding the following week in Washington, D.C., where our son would be officiating and our daughter, directing the rehearsal.
The kicker then was my sister’s first child’s high school graduation, in between the two events, all the way in Memphis, did I say 1,700 kilometres to western Tennessee, almost to Arkansas. We promised. Nine years ago, when my first child graduated high school, I stood in the kitchen with my sister and the leftover coleslaw and pinky swore that every member of our families would attend every one of our five collective kids’ high school graduations, in 2007, 2010, 2015 for mine and 2016 and 2018 for hers.
My brood in its entirety had already graduated, as was indeed witnessed by the whole of my sister’s family. Even the family gerbil April made one of the trips. And now the beginning of payback was my three active adult children in a minivan with their parents for the equivalent of a 40-hour work week. Which could have been worse. At least we paid for meals and hotels and didn’t mind listening to their music on Bluetooth.
In the end, unlike Little Miss Sunshine, which saw Grandpa succumbing on the road, unlike the Eagles, who ended up disbanding, we not only stayed alive and together, we found we liked sharing PB and Js on the road again.
Just like the old days when the car was packed with diapers and scooters on our way to Grandma’s for Christmas, we knew what games worked best in the car, how to sing harmony at loud decibels with the Dixie Chicks and the value of tossing Frisbees at rest stops to keep our muscles from atrophying. Actually, they tossed. I did downward dog in the grass and issued the familiar rants:
“Somebody’s going to get run over if you don’t stop tossing Frisbees in the parking lot!”
We ultimately got everywhere we needed to be, when we needed to be there — with only one near snafu, when our rental van ground to a dead-halt on the on-ramp to D.C, where two of the kids had to be on time for the wedding rehearsal.
We would have been much later arriving, except that the car rental company quickly showed up on the highway with the only exchange vehicle big enough — a 15-passenger van, which we had to white-knuckledrive into D.C. at rush hour to get to the rehearsal on time.
You’d think, when we rode up in our lumbering bus, with people falling out the doors and running into the venue, we’d be a bit of a spectacle, except that the bride was thrilled to see us.
“I love you!” she said. “I have been calling all over D.C. for a big van to take the wedding party all over the city tomorrow for photos!”
Much like Olive’s family who got her to the pageant on the time, we got to be the hero of the hour, even more so when some of us hopped in another car and raced to the liquor store to get the almost forgotten wedding beer and wine.
It was the perfect ending to more than 5,000 kilometres and 40 hours on the road, which, someone pointed out, is the equivalent of driving coast-to-coast.
That’s lot of time for a family to be glommed together in a travelling living room from which there is no escape.
Which is exactly why I am looking forward already to 2018.
Bring on that last cousin graduation. After all, we promised.