The Longest Road Trip ever, part 5
There are times you love life, and believe it’s all going your way, and then there are other times, when screaming, “Why me?” and “Why does everything always happen to me?” seems appropriate to the present circumstance. The latter makes you feel small and insignificant, like the only thing you’re good for is God’s little play toy. So we have a choice: Do we give in or go screaming?
After a major thunderstorm and what seemed to be a million other problems, it was finally time for breakfast. And really what is a trip across the lower half of the country without at least one breakfast at the golden arches? So hour number 15 of this amazing road trip meant that we would participate in the scrumptious ritual of the McD’s value meal – hash brown included of course.
For some reason now 15 years later I remember that I ordered a breakfast burrito. Kim and Allison and John ordered and we ate. Sounds ordinary right? We decided after breakfast that I would drive to the gas station across the street to finish my all night driving escapades. So I slowly pulled out of our parking spot. Unfortunately another car opposite of me slowly did the same thing. I backed out and turned, and just after I had come to a stop, shifting my gears from reverse to forward, the rear of that opposite car hit the rear of our car. This caused an accident. While no one was hurt, I muttered to myself, “Why me?”
Thankfully there was no damage to the cars, save some minor scratches to the other car, who seemed to really want to ignore the whole episode. We agreed. We just wanted to move forward. So I drove across the street. When I arrived to said gas station however, I quickly noted the extremely expensive gas the station offered. $2 was much too expensive to pay for gas in 1994, and I simply was not going to pay that much (Right now it is midnight and I would gladly put on some jeans and a t-shirt and drive to pay for $2 gas).
So I told them I’d drive to the next station, and we’d eventually get to cheaper gas. The only problem was we only had about 40 miles of gas left. I was confident however, that there would be a station somewhere along the lonely Texas highway.
Misplaced confidence leads to feelings of insignificance, and I was headed low fast. It took me 20 miles of searching for a gas station to finally see a sign that said, “Next gas station – 48 miles”. So I had no choice but to turn around and drive 20 miles away from our destination in order to buy expensive gas. After I did this, I allowed someone else to drive…
And I fell asleep for the next 3 hours.
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