Monday, October 5, 2009

Road Trip

I've been travelling to Portland a lot recently. The trip from Coquille to Portland takes approximately four and a half hours, unless you follow the speed limit exactly, which I do as far as everyone reading this is concerned. There's nothing like travelling in a car for extended periods of time with your children to really make you think about why you have children. In addition, we live in an age where children seem to need continuous electronic stimulation, which would be fine if said stimulation could include shock collars, which, according to my lawyer, it can not. Instead, children need continuous electronic video stimulation, in the form of handheld video games, DVD movies and episodes of inane cartoons that are not nearly as good as the cartoons we used to watch. Kids, of course, supplement the electronics with various irritation-stimulating activities, such as staring at each other for the express purpose of annoyance, attempting to NOT touch each other (as in, "MOM! SHE'S NOT TOUCHING MEEEEE!" while the offending child is, in fact, so close that scientific instruments would be necessary to measure the distance between finger and face) and playing the ever-popular "copy your sister" game.


During my last car trip, which was the second consecutive trip I had to take WITHOUT my husband, who was off in places like Rhode Island and Portland "working," and for which I will forgive him eventually, I started thinking about how we used to travel when I was a child. We did a lot of car travelling when I was a kid. You see, I grew up in Alaska. Alaska is a large state where places of interest are often separated by vast sectors of tundra, which is an extremely boring form of scenery, and your typical car trip to go camping could take upwards of 6 hours if the car didn't break down or you weren't slowed by a herd of moose obstructing the highway.


For example, my family, in an attempt to experience the miracle of nature, would routinely travel to a location called the Tangle Lakes. According to the modern miracle that is MapQuest, this trip should take about five and a half hours. In practice, however, it takes much, MUCH longer. First of all, we were travelling in an International Scout with a travel trailer attached to it which weighed significantly more than your modern travel trailer, which meant that we weren't exactly speeding down the highway. Also, our progress was impeded by potholes the size of water buffaloes. Finally, my mother would helpfully read the Milepost guide, which is a travel guide which only true Alaskans know how to read because it is written in code presumably so that non-Alaskans can't stumble upon oil fields or something. She would tell my father where various points of interest were along the way ("Look honey! A tundra museum at milepost 265!"). This would prompt my brother and I to whine about stopping at these points of interest because we needed to stretch our legs, go to the bathroom, eat and explore opportunities to irritate each other outside of the car, so that what should have taken five and a half hours ended up taking about nine hours.

Granted, we were measuring our trip in Kid Time, which is an extremely boring form of time. Back in the late 70's and early 80's, we didn't have portable dvd players, hand held video games and iPods. Most of our electronic devices weighed almost as much as Orson Welles and were not at all portable. The only portable device we had was a transistor radio, which was unhelpful inasmuch as it only had one earphone and it stopped receiving signals just outside of Anchorage. Therefore, my brother and I were forced to look out the windows, read books and listen to extremely non-cool music such as Anne Murray and Helen Reddy which my father taped from his extensive collection of sleep-inducing albums which we were never allowed to touch, presumably because he knew we would scratch them on purpose if given the opportunity.

After approximately 10 minutes of actual time (equalling seven and a half hours of Kid Time) we grew tired of reading and looking out windows, and instead resorted to pestering each other for the remaining trip, pausing only to pester our parents for food and water, which they were probably withholding in an attempt to weaken us in the hopes that we would become unable to move or speak.

It's good to know that almost nothing has changed in the last 30 years. Now, instead of being forced to look out the windows, read books and listen to Anne Murray, I force my children to look out the windows, read books and listen to 80's music. The view from our van windows on I-5 is no more exciting than the view I had in the International Scout; it's just less moose-intensive. And while I do allow the younger kids to play educational games on their Leapsters and Maggie to play extraordinarily non-educational games on her Nintendo DS, I've stopped bringing the DVD players because the bulk of our four hour drive to Portland would be spent arguing about who got to pick the movie. Also, I grew alarmed when my kids started measuring time in the number of SpongeBobs it took to get to where we were going:

Kids: MOM! Are we there yet?
Me: We're on the freeway. We're surrounded by fields. Does it look like we're there?
Kids: How many more SpongeBobs til' we're there?
Me: 15.
Kids: (after one SpongeBob) MOM! Are we there now?

So now, rather than allowing my children to watch videos, I instead spend the entire trip ranting about how I used to have to spend all my available vacation time listening to worse music than I am forcing on them and that they are lucky that they can play video games because all I ever got to do was look out the window and if they don't stop not touching each other I might have to pull the car over and give their video games away to the first person I see on the street. When my husband is in the car, I have backup; backup capable of launching himself from the front seat of the van all the way to the back seat in two seconds flat without touching the middle seat at all, and inserting himself between Luke and Maggie who at this point are too stunned to continue whining or almost not touching each other. When I'm on my own, however, all I can do is issue empty threats from afar. I realize that I'm making this much harder on myself than I need to, but I'm going to fall back on the time-honored tradition of forcing my children to be miserable because it builds character.

So, in about two weeks I will once again be making a trip to Portland, and once again my husband will be "working," this time in San Diego, for which I plan to forgive him eventually. I'm starting to think he's planning these trips on purpose. And my children, despite my many attempts to explain how good they have it, will begin asking if we are there yet 30 seconds after getting in the car.

I can't wait.