There is one thing that I have done as a kid that I have yet to do more than once with my son, when I took him to Georgia right after I got married.
That is to take a road trip. Every summer we would go down to my Grandpa's farm and it took us an hour and a half to get there. So for me and my brother those were road trips. Anything that took longer than a trip to the store was a road trip.
I had completely forgotten about them until talking to my dad yesterday. It's amazing how much of your childhood you forget. It really is. Anyways.
My mom would always pack us a cooler of snacks to have on the way down there:
Cheese in a can
Crackers
Bread
Bologna
A few cans of coke for my dad
Water
Chips
Maybe some cookies
There would always be like 3 or 4 cans of cheese too because my brother and I would always fight over who got the can the most and go through an entire can by ourselves. We would have challenges to see who could put the most cheese on a cracker before the cheese fell off the cracker or we couldn't fit it in our mouth anymore. We also knew the cans of coke were my dads and we were stuck with water, but it never failed we would team up to snag a can without our parents noticing. That always failed. While one of us was trying to slowing crack open the can without a ridiculously, heard on the other side of the world, pop and hiss the other would fake cough or sneeze until the can was open. Without fail my dad would always hear us open the can. Which was followed by him saying "Oh you guys are so nice opening a pop for me. Thank you!" So my brother and I would try to drink as much as we could before handing it up to him. That usually meant we would spill it on ourselves in the midst of the frantic "omg he caught us drink it!" frenzy going on in the back seat.
When it came to the bread, that was always an instant fail. Either my brother or I would always forget to close the bag which meant all the moisture, and sometimes straight ice water, from the cooler would get in the bag and leave us with a soggy sack of what use to be bread. So there went everyone else's sandwiches on this trip!
My brother and I would have belching contests too. I learned early on that Sprite made me gassy if I drank it too fast so when we would stop I always got a Sprite. I knew that was the only way I would beat my brother because he could belch on demand and I couldn't.
For a while in my childhood my mom had this huge Buick and when my brother and I were still small enough, and the seat belt laws were not in effect, we would take turns sleeping in the back window of the car. That rendered it impossible for my dad to see out the window while he was driving, but it slowed down the "he's touching me! Her arm is on me! His foot just touched my hand!" you would hear if both of us tried to sleep on the back seat. You just heard "he fell on top of me on purpose! She stuck her foot in my face!"
We also partook in turning around in our seat and putting on shows for the people driving behind us, waving hi incessantly to everyone behind us, or pretending to shoot people with our 'finger guns'. That was always a trip when you got the rare person that would respond back to us by waving, laughing, or dodging our fake bullets. Made our day.
If we got lucky our dad would have his work van for these trips. This meant there was no backseat for us to sit on. So we would grab our blankets and get ready for the ride. We slid around the back of that van on every hill and turn like we were in our own personal roller coaster. Shits and giggles were made that way. It also knocked us out, I mean rocked us to sleep, 90% of the time too. Then when we finally made it to the last mile stretch to get to my Grandpa's farm we would open the side door and hang out feet out. We would start yelling for our Grandpa's dog, who always showed up, and would run next to the van for the last little stretch of our trip.
Unfortunately my Grandpa died when I was 16, 4 1/2 years before my son was born, so I never got to take him on any of these trips. Now I can't afford road trips. It is something I have always wanted to do with him and one of these days we will spend a whole summer taking a road trip so he can make his own memories like this.
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