Road Trip, Help Wanted

After logging several hundred thousand miles in the last few years, we can find our way to most places without help. But Nicole and I have now plotted a long road trip south, and no one we know believes we can actually bring it to a successful conclusion. Or start, for that matter. Since we've announced our intentions, we have met with a chorus of disbelief.

On the one side are car-skeptics. We're doing the trip in a ten-year-old Toyota, our second car, which I keep meticulously maintained under the hood. It looks terrible, but this really doesn't matter—or so you might think. Those who know us universally believe that the single most important indicator of a car's health is its paint job. Second is upholstery. Our decision to sally forth in a car without leather has been a sore trial for our loved ones.

Next comes the trip itself. How shall we go? One might think that we would have the good sense to consult a map. But who needs a map when you have relatives? My in-laws each possess a remarkably detailed internal map of the entire tri-state area. Ask them how to go anywhere—no, don't bother asking, simply tell them you're going somewhere, and a remarkable stream of information will pour forth.

"Ok, you need to take the 143, then get on to the Taconic, go south until you hit the Henry Hudson, then go onto the Parkway—no, you're going in the morning, so there's construction on the Parkway. Sorry, stay on the Henry Hudson until the Bridge, get off at Tappan Zee, turn into Reed's Ice Cream, go through the parking lot, and take the right exit in front of the white house with the purple cow in front, and then get onto the Turnpike, which should take you down to 81."

For fun, you ask, "Are you sure the cow is purple?"

"They've had that cow—it's ceramic—since 2004, but if they've removed it or painted it some other color, just look for Moorpark."

"Is that a nursing home?"

"No, it's a Jewish deli. They have great rye bagels, you should pick some up for the road. Actually, come to think of it, if you want some great rye bagels…"

"I don't want rye bagels."

"You should not get off at Tappan Zee, but instead stay on the Connector until you get to Elizabethtown…"

In my inlaws' defense, I have never endured traffic during hundreds of trips with them through some of worst stretches of New York highways. But I simply don't care as much as they do about avoiding traffic. (Come to think of it, I don't think I care about any single thing on God's great green earth as much as they do about avoiding traffic).

So you see, we set off armed with a set of these directions—but immediately dropped them in favor of a Rand McNally road atlas. It guided us along a similar route down through New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and then Texas.

There, we picked up an entirely different set of directions, this time from my beloved relative. She has lived in Houston for almost 13 years and has learned to navigate it—I can only surmise-by getting lost in it most of the time. She's a geophysicist and only moderately absentminded as those people go. Still, she can get up from a dinner party, head towards the bathroom, return somehow with a handful of laundry, pass back by the dinner party wondering what all the people are doing there, put the wash in, wander back to the kitchen, remove a leftover bowl of fried rice from the fridge, take a few bites, and then suddenly remember the dinner party. She'll then rush back to her guests, sit down, when she realizes she has to get up again to go to the bathroom.

Her instructions had an ethereal quality.

"Ok where are you? Are you on Merchant St?"

"Yes."

"Ok, when you pass the pizza place, go to the 2nd or 3rd light and turn left at the next street. I think it's Pine-something."

You continue on. The second light is for Wetherford St., the third is for Courtland Court. The fourth is for Nottingham Oaks Blvd. Then you pass over some railroad tracks into a business district. Finally you say, "We did pass a Nottingham Oaks."

"Yes, that's it! Pine, Oaks, what's the difference. I knew it was a tree."

In this way we arrived safely in Houston. We got a warm welcome. Then somebody may have said, "You drove from Connecticut? It's amazing you got all that way without leather."