Without further intro, here's Rachel..
Generally, I like road trips. I've gone on several road trips with Angel in the year and a half we've been married. We even went on a road trip to Mall of America last month!
Angel is thinking, "Why are you telling me to smile at the camera while I'm driving? Haven't you head of keeping your eyes on the road?"I don't drive very often on roadtrips, even now that I have a driver's license. When I was a kid, I didn't drive at all. On road trips with my family, I would sleep, read books, and play with pull-and-peel Twizzlers till we got to our destination.
Okay, so maybe I still play with Twizzlers. I created this lovely piece of art on our honeymoon!One of the very last vacations I ever took with my family was a road trip that went a bit rougher than usual. You see, the weird thing about road trips is that you need a car. We had a car, but as it turned out, that wasn't good enough.
Just to let you know who you're dealing with here.So, here's the setup: Two parents, and seven kids, of which I am the oldest, if not the biggest. I don't have any actual pictures from the vacation, since that was before I got a computer, but I think we were all about two years younger than we were in the picture above. I was 15 or 16 at the time. I should also mention that we weren't living in America, but in a country where English isn't so widely spoken and things don't work quite the same way.
My parents decided that our summer vacation would take us to a big city about 6 hours away from where we lived. If you've ever traveled with kids, you know that you have to stop every three or four hours, or even more often. We were an hour or so from our destination when we stopped at a rest area, got out of the car, and ran to the restrooms. In a few minutes, everyone piled back into the car, strapped our seabelts on, and got ready for the last leg of the trip. Only...Dad couldn't get the car to start.
With seven of us in the back and the hot sun shining through the windows, the temperature inside the car quickly became unbearable without working air-con, so we all got out while Dad tried to figure out what was wrong. He couldn't find anything obvious, or anything that seemed like an easy fix, so he ended up needing to figure out how call a tow truck in the area and get our car towed to a mechanic's shop.
Meanwhile, there are seven kids of various ages and sizes either wandering around the rest stop or slumped over picnic tables, not feeling particularly cheerful. Dad thinks that this wasn't the greatest start to our vacation, so he tells us he's going to buy us all ice cream cones! From a guy with his own little ice cream stand at the rest area. There's only one flavor, and the ice cream is yellow, but we just figure that it's vanilla and Dad orders seven cones.
Only it's not vanilla. It's durian ice cream. If you haven't heard of durian, it is most famous for being a fruit with a very strong and very bad smell. Durian ice cream is ice cream that tastes, very, very bad. After one lick, all we wanted to do was secretly throw our ice cream cones away, but Dad was mad when he caught us doing that. "How bad could it be?!" he said, and tried one of my little sisters' cones. Then he said that it was all right to throw them away.
The tow truck came after an hour, and brought a taxi with it for the rest of us to ride in. We were all hungry by the time we got to the mechanic's shop, so Mom took us to a nearby restaurant while Dad negotiated the fixing of our car.
It turned out that the car needed a new motherboard, I believe it's called. The very important computer thing in cars? Anyways, it would take a whole week to fix, since they needed to order the part. Dad and Mom had us take a taxi to our hotel to complete the trip, leaving our car at the mechanic's shop in the middle of nowhere, and we took public transport everywhere we wanted to go once we reached the big city. That's the nice thing about those huge cities--you might need a car to get there in the first place, but once you're there, the subway and bus system will do!
My sister, looking like she thinks she'll meet Prince Charming on the public bus. Could happen, I suppose.I don't remember too much of what else we did on that trip, but I sure remember what it took to get there!
