Road Tripping

Mom and I might road trip down to Seward on Saturday, just for the day and to get out of town. It's not a bad little trip and takes about 2 hours to get there. If we go I will take my camera and snap some pictures. Mom and I have always been real good partners for road trips, we have always had a great time and get along amazingly well. No matter what my age was, you put her and I in a car together and let us travel the open road and we get along. It always amazed me cause I know I could be a MAJOR brat (still am some days) but something just clicked and we never fought, we would just talk, laugh and sing along to the radio or tapes or Cd's.

There is one such road trip that sticks out in my mind. I was 13 turning 14, mom, my brother and I went down to Washington to visit family, my brother went to stay with our aunt in a different part of the state while mom and I went to spend some time in Spokane with grandma and the rest of the family that lived there. We spent a couple days there hanging out I think maybe a week, then mom and I hit the road to go pick up my brother, head down to I want to say Yakima (don't hold me to that I could be wrong) to see more family and friends of moms, then we continued down into Oregon to see even more family. Once we picked my brother up any time it was just the 3 of us he would complain about wanting to go home, over and over and over again. Once we were done in Oregon and made it back to Seattle, mom had had enough of his Complaining and sent his butt back home, he was 17 turning 18 so don't get any ideas, he was old enough to be home alone. We stayed at the Double Tree Inn and with check in we got 2 free cookies, it just so happened that it was my birthday the next day so I got 2 cookies all to myself. Plus the added bonus of not having my brother around on my birthday cause he was flying home. So mom get's him off to the airport the next morning and we check out and go get breakfast.

Mom asks me what route we should take to go back to Spokane, we could go the short way and be back to the farm in 4 hours or take the North Cascade Highway which is an all day drive that she has always wanted to do. So we decide to do the all day route back to the farm. I have been the navigator for the whole trip so me and the map were close friends by this point in the trip and by the end of the trip we were even closer friends. Because of never traveling this route before mom wasn't sure if we had missed the turns I had mapped out so she kept having me open the map up to double check, I must have folded the map a thousand times just on this one part of the trip. Mom made a drastic mistake on this trip, we had stopped in some little town to get drinks and snakes and I ended up getting a bag of mini reeses cups and a 6 pack of 20oz Surge soda to help keep me awake. The mistake here was I was now hyped up on sugar and caffeine stuck in a car with no outlet for the energy I had, I was also slightly bored not a good combination. At one point we passed a bunch of cows in a field and I rolled down the window and proceeded to moo at them. Yes you read that right I MOOED at cows! We finally make it back to Spokane, pick up a birthday cake for me at the store and once on the road that lead to grandmas house mom decided to let me drive the rental car. I'm pretty sure I gave mom quite a few gray hairs that day, being as it was the first time I had ever driven and that I almost took out a fence as I turned into grandmas driveway. Which wouldn't have been good cause that fence was keeping horses from getting loose. All and all it was a great road trip when it was just the 2 of us.

It has been almost 10 years since we went down to the states and road tripped, I miss it, I want to go do it again so bad. I would love to do a cross country road trip. But would settle for doing a road trip like mom and I have done in the past with just doing a few states. Yes I know I said we were possibly doing a road trip to Seward but it's not the same, granted it's still fun but well there is only 2 roads out of Anchorage and we have traveled them many times before. Don't get me wrong I like going on road trips but I feel as these ones up here are just a big tease cause you really don't go all that far, And been there done that got the t-shirt, mug, hat, magnet, underwear and pants.