Thinking Inside the Box: The Road Trip

Published by Brad H. on April 30th, 2008 in Humor | 4 Comments

I think we can all agree that one of the most stressful things about moving is finding a new place to live. When looking for an apartment you have to start scouting out neighborhoods, finding out availabilities, planning visits, and making sure that those three felonies and five misdemeanors (alleged, not proven) don't come up during the conversation.

I imagine that buying a house is even more complicated with the added pressure of getting a mortgage (let's spin the wheel of credit and see where you come up…) and taking care of all the closing paperwork and redecorating.

At any rate, a few weeks ago my wife started the laborious process of finding us someplace to call home. After lots of web searches, phone calls, friend cajoling and shaman consulting we scheduled a day last week to go out and look at five different properties. Of course that means it's time for a road trip.

The first leg of our trip was pretty normal as we left home and passed through familiar towns we had known growing up. All that changed however, once we got east of Columbus, OH. Now then, not to offend anyone out there who grew up in Eastern Ohio, but I really don't know how you did it. Long swaths of nothing stretched for miles in every direction, and my wife started salivating at the mere prospect of seeing a town the same way a dog gets excited when he knows he's getting close to the park. Whenever we would pass a few buildings and a sign she would whip out her cell phone and start snapping pictures like crazy, just as a reminder that there were people out here, we just hadn't seen any of them yet.

We eventually stopped for gas and food in a town where everyone seemed to know everyone else, making us stick out all the more readily. I may as well have been wearing a t-shirt that said "We're not from around here." Actually, I was, but I'm sure that didn't have anything to do with the stares. To top off the pit stop, the men's room at the restaurant was out of order, so I was faced with a decision; do I swallow my male pride and go to the ladies' room, or do I clamp down my bladder and try and hold out for another three hours? I decided to suck it up and go ahead to the ladies' room because there are few things more shameful in all of mandom than stopping a road trip just to use the bathroom. You better be getting gas, food, or be on fire before that car pulls over. Besides, I reasoned that since the men's room was out of order the other bathroom was now unisex, so I was in no danger of having my man card revoked.

As we continued our journey we quickly discovered that the route we had chosen featured a whole lot of nothing. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Western Maryland all featured about the same landscape as Eastern Ohio, and I had begun to wonder what I had gotten myself into. Thankfully, as we neared Washington, DC signs of life sprung up and I was shaken from my fear of driving off the edge of the world and falling onto the turtle that holds the whole thing up.

After a night of greasy takeout and restless sleep we were ready to find ourselves a place to live. We had scheduled five appointments, but only needed two to know we had found the perfect place. We had spent 10 hours on the road, and now we had decided where to live in 45 minutes. In a way I felt cheated. A part of me wanted to demand we look at the other places or at least make our new property manager take us on a sightseeing tour of the area so that driving all this way for such a short meeting and decision wouldn't feel like a waste. But hey, now when we show up we'll actually have a place to put our stuff, so I guess I can't complain.

Since we finished early we finished early we decided to just go ahead and drive home that same day. This is when we learned the most important lesson of the whole trip… ass grooves are the most powerful forces in a car. You see, we took my car and I had driven the entire way out. We decided to switch places on the way back so I could rest for a bit and my wife could not be bored to death staring at the same cornfields and billboards as she had seen on the way there. She knew exactly which exits housed the best fireworks outlet stores, but I was completely ignorant to the fact, a wrong which must be remedied.

However, things didn't go as planned. When we traded seats neither one of us could get comfortable, and it was so bad for her that one of her legs started to fall asleep. After just a couple hours we switched back, and instantly we were each fine again. We attributed this to the fact that since our posteriors differ so much in size, shape, and density that our respective seats have become so in tune with our own rumps that they will simply reject that of another. It is a symbiotic relationship, one which cannot be undone through sheer force of will.

We made one last stop on the way home at a hillbilly gas station where my wife refused to get out of the car or even unlock her door. While I found the place to be a wonderful mecca of all things redneck (where else can you find gas, beer, chewing tobacco, and bait all under one roof?) she feared that if she came out of the car she'd be kidnapped and turned into someone's mountain wife. Her fears were confirmed when a gentlemen no less than 70 years old decided it was just "too dern hot" and took off his shirt. I bid the gentle hilljacks farewell and we continued on our merry way, vowing to never again stop at a town where the first thing you see from the freeway ramp is a feed lot.

The most foreboding part of the whole process was that we're going to have to make the same trip again next weekend. This time though, we're only going one way, and I already know the two most important rules of the road; there's no shame in creating your own unisex bathroom, and car seats are not one size fits all.