Friday, August 12, 2005
Los Angeles to Chicago in a 1990 Red Volkswagen Jetta, Manual Transmission
My family loves road trips and ever since my brother and I were old enough to peer out the windows of a moving automobile, the four of us have done everything from the Pacific Coast Highway, the Andaman coast in Thailand and Singapore to Cameron Highlands in Malaysia. We've done trips where the air-conditioning broke down in the middle of hot humidity two hours into a week-long drive (Cherating, Malaysia), where we were attempted to rev up a steep slope and the gear gave up on us (Koh Samui, Thailand) and where we got a flat in the middle of winter with no other car or house in sight (near Marysville, Maryland). So when you think about it, no amount of family strife under the car roof can really match all the literal road blocks we found ourselves stumbling into.
Sometimes, it's just my mom and me, and on the few cross-country drives we've taken together (Route 66, the Great Mississippi River Road), it feels exactly like Thelma and Louise, except with a happy ending. In 1999, after spending a summer in Los Angeles, my mom flew out so we could drive the legendary Route 66 in the wrong direction back to Chicago. Our wheels were a 1990 red Volkswagen Jetta -- everything was manual with that car, my first car, from the transmission to the sun-roof to the doors and the CD player that sometimes had to be nudged to play. On the first two days, we fought about everything and anything a mother and daughter could -- how I was planning to prioritize my plans for the future entering the last year of college, me feeling too grown-up to listen to anything my mom said, my mom finding it harder and harder to let go of her children that she loved so much. It was Elvis's death anniversary and the oldies channel played his music all day, but he didn't have a chance between our raised voices and tears.
Towards the end of the second day, driving towards the Arizona/New Mexico border, all of a sudden the skies darkened. Because out west, there's nothing but you, the two-lane blacktop, the plains and the mountains in the fair horizon, every change in scenery seems a little more dramatic than usual -- similar to what we've been experiencing in the car. It began pouring and the wind pommelled through like a Hoover vacuum tunnel. We had to pull to the side -- there was no way we could have made it through without ending up as a tumbleweed drifting across the road. We sat in silence as the storm blew through -- awed by nature, realizing that there was a far bigger force than our hard-headedness.
As soon as the storm ended, the biggest rainbow we had ever seen stretched across the entire sky -- it was the Grand Canyon of rainbows. It was majestic, magical and I think that if it wanted to, it would have gone all the way to New York City. My mom broke the silence first when she told me to take a picture of it for my dad and brother.
We had other fights on the rest of the trip, of course, but none that I remember in any detail. The 10 minutes or so that I sat in the car, next to one of my oldest and best friends in the world, staring at the biggest rainbow I had ever seen in my life, I remember every minute of. We both still do.
Sometimes, it's just my mom and me, and on the few cross-country drives we've taken together (Route 66, the Great Mississippi River Road), it feels exactly like Thelma and Louise, except with a happy ending. In 1999, after spending a summer in Los Angeles, my mom flew out so we could drive the legendary Route 66 in the wrong direction back to Chicago. Our wheels were a 1990 red Volkswagen Jetta -- everything was manual with that car, my first car, from the transmission to the sun-roof to the doors and the CD player that sometimes had to be nudged to play. On the first two days, we fought about everything and anything a mother and daughter could -- how I was planning to prioritize my plans for the future entering the last year of college, me feeling too grown-up to listen to anything my mom said, my mom finding it harder and harder to let go of her children that she loved so much. It was Elvis's death anniversary and the oldies channel played his music all day, but he didn't have a chance between our raised voices and tears.
Towards the end of the second day, driving towards the Arizona/New Mexico border, all of a sudden the skies darkened. Because out west, there's nothing but you, the two-lane blacktop, the plains and the mountains in the fair horizon, every change in scenery seems a little more dramatic than usual -- similar to what we've been experiencing in the car. It began pouring and the wind pommelled through like a Hoover vacuum tunnel. We had to pull to the side -- there was no way we could have made it through without ending up as a tumbleweed drifting across the road. We sat in silence as the storm blew through -- awed by nature, realizing that there was a far bigger force than our hard-headedness.
As soon as the storm ended, the biggest rainbow we had ever seen stretched across the entire sky -- it was the Grand Canyon of rainbows. It was majestic, magical and I think that if it wanted to, it would have gone all the way to New York City. My mom broke the silence first when she told me to take a picture of it for my dad and brother.
We had other fights on the rest of the trip, of course, but none that I remember in any detail. The 10 minutes or so that I sat in the car, next to one of my oldest and best friends in the world, staring at the biggest rainbow I had ever seen in my life, I remember every minute of. We both still do.
// posted by Desiree @ 12:50 PM 
