by Patti
...it's been a while.
You see, I was in a car for 539583950342 hours, which was not necessarily conducive to blogging. But I loved every torturous second, and now I can blog all about it in endless prose! Lucky you!
There is no better way to start off a fresh, new year then to get in a car and just drive. And that is exactly what we did. Literally. On January 1st, M, S, and I all piled into the fully loaded car, put it in "Drive", and, well, drove. All the way to Texas! Yee-haw!
The plan was to visit my cousin in Houston. But first! We had to make a few requisite stops at Middle of Nowhere gas stations, and let me tell you: the first day of 2012 in Illinois was
WIN. DY. You don't believe me? You think I'm being dramatic? ME? DRAMATIC?!?!?!? Behold the PROOF:
Once I screwed my head back onto my neck, we had to make a very special pit-stop as we continued our way down Illinois. Remember my
post a couple of weeks ago about Homie? Well, I was right. AS USUAL. Homie worked his magic on M's heart, and, after a visit to see this....
....we will no longer be dog-less as of February 12th. That's right, our very own version of Homie, who shall be named Gaucho, will be peeing on our floors, and farting in our family room, and snoring loudly yet cozily in our laps very, VERY soon! I swear, S shivered her way across the rest of Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas, she was that excited. She IS that excited. Road trips with special pit-stops are magical like that.
After that life-changing pit-stop, which ended up being so not a pit-stop but a 2.5 hour visit that included chasing dogs, petting ponies, and holding newborn puppies - what kind of Heaven all wrapped up in one place is that for a kid? - we continued our way down Illinois in utter darkness. It felt like we had just started our trip - I mean, we were still in the same STATE for crying out loud - yet...we were already tired. And STARVING. And the number of restaurants and that were available for us to choose from to satiate that starvation was exactly zero. So we drove, and drove, and drove, and ended up in Missouri and still drove, until I finally spotted a familiar site: DENNY'S! Oh, Savior of Road Trips!
We wearily pulled into the parking lot, S still vibrating with excitement, and literally shuffled our way into the saddest Denny's I've ever been in. The customers all looked on the brink of death, on crack, or severely suicidal, and there was apparently only one waitress working the joint. But we were desperate and starving and No Way in Hell were going to keep driving, so we grabbed one of the booths and waited what seemed a thousand years to place our order. M jokingly asked the waitress if the food he ordered was going to like the picture? She cocked her head and smiled vacantly. Our food finally came - and it actually
did look like the picture! - and we scarfed it down in 3.5 seconds, paid and bolted to the beyond. We drove for another zillion years and finally found a hotel that wasn't run by Norman Bates, and proceeded to sleep like....shit. There was some weird dripping outside the window all. night. long. And people kept walking by our door all. night. long. And some man on another floor was snoring and we could actually HEAR HIM snoring all. night. long, and ohmygod it was a total nightmare.
But the next day dawned fresh and beautiful, and though we missed the "free, hot breakfast!" because we finally fell asleep only a few hours before the end of the breakfast deadline, we still felt excited, despite the lack of sleep. Since we missed breakfast, and worrying we'd hit another stretch of food desert, we took advantage of the McDonald's that was right next to the hotel and hit the drive-thru. Here was our order, and pay close attention, because it's critical to this absolutely compelling story I am telling you:
Egg McMuffin
2 Coffees
1 Large Orange Juice
Fruit & Yogurt Parfait
Got it? Good. We pulled up to the window to pay and get our stuff, and the woman handed us one bag and 1 coffee. "Y'all have a nice day!" Call me gifted, but I somehow knew the other coffee and the juice were not in the bag. "We ordered TWO coffees, and a juice..."
"Oh! Sorry 'bout that!" Oh, those Missourians. Missourans? She disappeared for a minute and then handed us another coffee and a juice. I peeked inside the bag and noticed the Fruit & Yogurt parfait was also missing. "The yogurt?" I asked.
"....OH! Oh, sorry 'bout that!" She once again disappeared, but this time? It was FOR. EH. VER. I'm not even kidding when I tell you that a full five minutes - which, come on, let's face it, in drive-thru time is forever - passed before she came back and popped her head out to give us an update. "She's still workin' on it, sorry!"
Working on it? What is there to work on? It's a Fruit & Yogurt Parfait not an art project. We looked behind us and noticed that a line of cars was starting to build. All because of a Fruit & Freakin' Yogurt Parfait! She
finally came back and stuck her head out the window, but M's head was blocking my view and I couldn't see anything. I heard him exclaim, "THAT'S HUGE!" Since I couldn't see anything, I could only imagine that it actually MUST have been a work of art, a HUGE work of art that was worth all the time we had been made to wait. And that is when he turned towards S and I with this in his hands:
I'm not sure I can effectively show you with this picture just how TINY this Fruit & Yogurt Parfait was. I mean, it must have come off the Shrunken Munchkin Menu, because it was microfuckingscopic, and it most certainly did NOT look like the picture, and I could not believe that we had waited THAT LONG for
this. And that she had given us UPDATES on its progress. Oh, but how we laughed. And laughed. And laughed pretty much all the way through Missouri up to the Arkansas state line.
We finally made it to Houston, and entering the city was a little surreal. You see, I left the city 27 years ago for the great green pastures of Oregon, and I had not been back since. We had a nice, albeit bionic, visit with my cousin. We ate Texas Bar-B-Q and Southwestern Mexican food, and best of all? I got to visit my old neighborhood house, the one in front of which I was kissed by my first "Great Love". And as we passed the front porch I could almost see myself there, standing on tiptoes, being kissed. I showed S my old high school - the one I went to for 2 years before leaving for good, and she practically blew my ear drums out with her "OHMYGOD IT'S HUMONGOUS!" And you know what? It
was. I thought it would look smaller now that I'm all bitter and jaded, but it looked even bigger than I remembered it to be. And it was pretty neat to share a piece of my past with S like that.
After we left Houston, we impulsively decided to take the "long way home", and swung through New Orleans. We arrived just in time for dinner, and feasted on some gumbo and crusty french bread and Cajun beer right in the heart of the French Quarter. We drove through the streets a while, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the adorable houses that were all adorned with flickering hanging lanterns for porch lights, drove past countless bars with jazz bands playing in the open windows, saw a man doing clap push-ups on the sidewalk, and then deemed ourselves to have "seen New Orleans".
The next day, we detoured through Memphis to visit Graceland. We didn't really have time to tour the mansion and all its tacky glory, but we were able to see the grounds and even sign our names on the giant stone wall that surrounds the mansion. I whipped out a red marker and we added our greetings to the millions of others. We even saw one woman crying. Oh, how she had loved Elvis Aaron Presley.
And then, just like that, it was time to head home. Sure, there are more bad hotel stories to tell, and a few "Mo-OM! I'm BORED!" moments that made M and I want to throw S out the window of our speeding car. But I won't torture you with those details. Because the truth is, all those many miles of road, and those bad hotels, and yes, even those "Mo-OM! I'm BORED"s all add up to the three of us simply making memories together.
And there's nothing better than that.
