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On the Road to Barf City . . . an Adventure in Travel with Dad |
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These excursions usually spanned the distance from Southern California to Memphis, but we also drove from Memphis to Virginia and North Carolina. Mama spent several days preparing for them because my father insisted on self-sufficiency. In other words – bathroom stops were coordinated with refueling. If you couldn't hold it long enough, there was always the old Folger's can in the back – not a particularly attractive option to a seven-year-old. Before we left on our journeys, my mother boiled eggs and made sandwiches. She also made a bed for my sister and me in the back of the Rambler, putting a couple of blankets and pillows down for us. We'd sleep for the first few hundred miles. With the exception of my father's penchant for driving two-thirds of the way across the country with no sleep, the trips were kind of fun. I said kind of – there were also moments that will live forever in my memory as incentives to fly. My sister and I both were subject to motion sickness. Apparently no one in our family ever figured out the connection between this malady and reading, because Elaine and I always read in the car and always got sick at one point or another. Of course, some of our queasiness was due to my parents being heavy smokers who would ride along with the windows rolled up, puffing away on their unfiltered Pall Malls. To paraphrase the Glenn Campbell song, by the time we got to Phoenix, Elaine and I were usually green-faced, sometimes with interesting results. One example that stands out in our collective memories is when we drove across country with my brother when he was very little – maybe two or three. My sister and I were in the back seat of the Rambler and my brother was in the very back. We'd stopped along the way and eaten some barbecue sandwiches – in the car, of course, Daddy never, ever went inside a restaurant while traveling. That slowed his forward momentum. After we ate, Daddy must have gassed up because all of us kids had candy. My sister's favorite at the time was a tube of little chocolate candies with a hollow center full of caramel called Rollos. She ate hers as we tooled on down the road, windows up, parents smoking, reading our books – need I say more? About 20 minutes after ingesting the candy, Elaine evolved into an alien – turning three different shades of green. She then looked at me and barfed – right in my lap. But it didn't stop there. Before I could react, my baby brother – not wanting to be outdone – leaned over the back seat to see what was going on and uttered one word which lives on in the Moore family history: "Gah-wee!" Then he, too, threw up. Also right on top of me. I would like to add that although sorely tempted, I managed to keep my barbecue down. However, the entire barfing incident – though unpleasant to say the least – was productive in a strange sort of way. Because, for the only time I can remember in the entire history of our cross-country treks, my father made an unscheduled stop that didn't involve the radiator boiling over. As Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels might have said about the whole thing: "Good Gah-wee Miss Mah-wee!" |
