Boy has it been a while since I’ve done one of these! You remember the idea, right?
Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway‘s contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s unique take on the topic.
This Week’s Topic is: In celebration of the release of Kristin Halbrook’s NOBODY BUT US (hooray!!) we’re asking: Zoe and Will set off on the road to seek a better life and encounter loads of drama on the way. What’s the most dramatic road trip you’ve ever been on?
I’ve been on a lot of road trips in my life. In fact, until last year I had never even stepped foot on an airplane! So, you can imagine the number of road trip stories I have from my childhood.
All the best ones though — and, yes, the most dramatic — involve my grandmother.
Oh, Granny.
From being lost in Orlando to waiting three hours for a locksmith in the Florida heat at Gatorland while the key was in her pocket, trips with my Granny have always been an adventure.
But maybe none so much as the time we went to Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Martinsville, Virginia.
You see, we have learned over the years that anything that is going to go wrong while we’re on a road trip, it will happen in public. There’s just no other option. So we arrive in one piece, despite my dad’s best efforts, to a little historical site with lots of neat costumes and whatnot for lunch.
This is the lunch that has lived on in infamy, because after my mother asked for “sweet tea” which is apparently not a thing that far north, she was adding sweetener when she flicked three (not one, THREE) sugar packets across the restaurant and into the back of a man’s head. As if that wasn’t show enough, when Granny’s salad was brought out she started eating, naturally. And only when she nearly put the blasted thing in her mouth did she realize there was a GIANT MOTH in her salad.
I’ve never heard someone shriek so loudly in my life. She bolted out of her seat and across the restaurant, retching the whole way. We were such a scene. I can only imagine what people must have thought of us!
S0 the next day we drove up to Virginia for a Nascar race. My dad LOVED Nascar. Along the way this black car kept nearly running us off the road, and my dad — the race car driver — decided it’d be wise to try and outrun the guy. Which turned out in our favor, ironically enough, as the jerk got pulled over and I got to color a fast sign to wave out the window at him that said, “You’ve been black flagged.”
Wouldn’t you know that day was destined to be the hottest one on record too? We got to that racetrack and people were dropping like flies from the heat. Mom wound up packed in ice. Granny went to check on her and collapsed. It was a right catastrophe.
And then, in that epic moment at the end of every vacation, as we were fighting to get out of the parking lot of the race track so we could head south and get some proper sweet tea (Really, what’s so wrong with sweet tea, guys? Get on that already. 
), my mom said her signature line, “Well, good thing I never lost anything in Virginia since I’ll NEVER be coming back!” And it wasn’t even over yet.
(Side note: She has been back, but not to a race, and she rather enjoyed herself.)
You know how tensions tend to get super high at the end of a road trip? Well, Dad is the champion of all things tension-related, so you can imagine his stress level as we crossed back over the FL line with five people in the car. My little sister, who was maybe eight or nine at the time, had the impeccable timing of reading a bumper sticker that stated, “don’t be a dick,” right as Dad was going into full-on meltdown.
Yeah, we feared for her life…until we all cracked up.
That was most definitely the most dramatic road trip in the history of EVER.
What do you think, can yours top mine?
