From Here to Eternity...or the Beach (whichever comes first)

by Jody Worsham
All rights reserved for plane tickets

A family vacation is supposed to bring a family closer together and it does; especially  if there are two grown-ups, two children at the warring age, and a shih zu that lives up to her name packed into a car with enough electronics to launch a sattelite.  Still, the children wanted to go to the beach so that's where we headed.

The original plan was to leave on a Sunday and I had been packing the RV accordingly.  On Saturday afternoon Dr. Hubby decided it would be nice to break up the long drive by leaving on Saturday
in an hour.-   I went into overdrive and started throwing the rest of the last minute items into the trailer...leaving the hot dogs still frozen in the refrigerator freezer.  One mile down the road we had to stop to see if my hormones had been packed.  Finding that they had been, it was safe to continue our journey.

Nine miles down the road I had finally untangled all the earphones, assigned chargers to the various i-pods and i-pads, and negotiated a peace treaty for the next ten miles, when I saw pieces of rubber flying through the air in the side mirror.  A blow-out!  Dr. Hubby managed to steer us into an RV park with a semi-level surface to change the tire.  A contruction worker took pity on an old man, a fat wife, two kids, and a dog and changed the tire for us.

With no spare tire, I confiscated the i-pad, dialed up On Star and began a search for a set of four tires or at least a spare.  It was 5 o'clock on a Saturday evening.  Who was going to be open?  No one.
We made it another 120 miles and stopped at an RV camp.


The next morning our ever faithful Wal-Mart had 4 tires.  We drove there and an hour later we had four new tires.  The plan was to keep the  other 3 tires as a back-up.  Where we were going to put them hadn't been decided.  The point was moot since the other three tires were all cracked as well.
We headed out for the remaining five hours of the trip.

We gave the tween-ager the TomTom (gps) .  "What's a POI?" "Point of Interest."  For the next five hours she discovered more apps on the TomTom than we ever imagined.   We heard "Four hours and fifty-two minutes to destination.  Traveling at 61 mph, legal speed 70, crossing an intersection just...about...now.  Four hours and fifty minutes to destination.  Traveling at 66 mph, legal speed 70, and we are making a slight curve to the left,  right about....now.  Four hours and 48 minutes to destination.  Traveling at 82 mph, legal speed 70 and there is a lake immediately to your right."
If this weren't enough, Dr. Hubby was discovering all the buttons on the car.  His favorite was the miles per gallon feature.  "We are averaging 6 miles per gallon.  That's awful.  No wait, that's 99 miles per gallon."  "That's because we are going downhill, Honey."  Actually, we were getting more like $50 per hour.  Every hour we stopped to fill up with gas and to check the tires.

A normal seven hour drive to the beach took us two days, four tires, three game chargers, an on going conversation with On Star, a constant miles per gallon up date, and a cartographic description of the route by the Tween-ager.

In self-defense, I lapsed into a coma at 8 miles per gallon, four hours and 32 minutes to destination with a slight bend in the road right about....now.