Member-only story
My family and I embarked on many a road trip during my childhood years. From moving across country from Alberta to Ontario in a furniture truck with a cat, a dog, and a car in tow when I was eight to several trips down into the States on various vacations we put a lot of mileage on our family vehicles over the years.
Our trips were pretty much calamity free, though not without their adventures. The transmission literally fell out onto my father’s foot just as we were passing the only motel we had seen in hours, during the furniture truck move we ended up coasting downhill on the few vapors remaining in two empty gas tanks into a gas station which had stayed open late into the evening because someone else has phoned on ahead and asked them to, and we ended up getting bumped up to an executive suite at one hotel because we had pulled into town at the beginning of a long weekend filled with local conventions and that was literally the only room remaining in the entire city.
Things have always turned out well for us, though we have cut it rather close from time to time. I even found out that, unlike most folks, I am perfectly comfortable reading in the back seat. Dozens and dozens of books piled up beside all that mileage. It wasn’t always glitz and glamour. We had our…