Growing up in Atlanta, road trips were a big part of my childhood. In the summer we’d drive five hours to St. Simons Island on the Atlantic or maybe eight hours to Orlando. I’ve sat through the twelve hour drive to Washington D.C. many times. I’ve got family in Panama City, Florida so I’ve made that six hour trip at least a dozen times in my life.
But until this year every trip was made from the passenger seat.
January 2016 is now etched in my memory as the month I piloted my first road trip. For years, my husband and I have been content to get chauffered around or borrow cars during our holiday trip to Atlanta, but this year we rented a car. And I was the only licensed driver for it.
We rented a…honestly, I don’t remember the name. It was a Kia. It had a hatchback, four doors, and operated on gasoline. I’m not a car person.
The most impressive detail about the car was it’s near pocket-size. I’ve traveled enough to know that in many countries our Kia would have been considered normal-sized. Not so on an American interstate. Imagine your dining room table covered with water melons and one matchbox sitting in the middle of them. My family and I were inside the matchbox.
That’s what it felt like as I merged onto Interstate-285 around Atlanta, aka the scariest place in the United States. The road circles the city for 64 death-defying miles and is a training center for domestic terrorists.
My time skirting between 18 wheelers on I-285 in a freshman engineering class’s final exam with a screaming preschooler and frantic husband in the back seat was spent mostly in a semi-conscious state operating on pure adrenaline. It’s apparently standard operating procedure on 285 for freight truck drivers to allow about five feet of space between the truck and car in front, demonstrating complete indifference to the laws of Georgia, physics, and common sense.
My fellow Americans, you’re all worried about the wrong things. You’re not going to be blown up. You’re going to be flattened by an 18 wheel truck filled with hamburger buns.
My family and I survived that first hour and a half in the car and made it out of metro Atlanta. We left the traffic and everything else behind. Welcome to rural Georgia. We hope you enjoy our pine trees.
There is farm land in Georgia. Lots of it. But much further south. We were driving South-west toward the Florida panhandle, cutting across southern Alabama. It’s a route that doesn’t provide much in terms of scenery save for the occasional buildboard advertising Jesus or a strip club.
Even the exits disappear and fifteen minutes can pass before it’s even possible to get off the highway. A fact critically important when traveling with a four-year old who does NOT like to take bathroom breaks before her bladder is on the verge of exploding.
“There’s an exit with a McDonald’s ahead. Little Bit, do you need to go potty?”
“No.”
“Are you sure you don’t need to go potty?”
“No.”
“Does that mean you do need to go?”
“No.”
“So you don’t need to go pee pee?”
“No.”
“Why don’t we stop and you just try?”
“I said no, Mommy.”
Do I even need to write the conversation that happens two minutes past the exit?
Like most Americans, our bathrooms of choice are McDonald’s. Clean and available when literally no other restaurant is in a ten mile radius. Whatever else is true about the chain, their bathrooms are a service to humanity because the alternative to McDonald’s is a gas station.
Gas stations in South Georgia and Alabama. They’re actually quite fascinating as long as you’re traveling with your traditional nuclear family and don’t have an Obama sticker on your car. In addition to a fabulous array of retro snack food like Yoohoo and Hostess SnoBalls, there’s no end to the items decorated in camouflage: hats, shirts, tabbaco, koozees, lighters, and bibles. You can also pick up the monthly publication of mugshots of people arrested by the city police. It’s the society pages of Pittsview, Alabama. (That’s a real town, btw.)
My husband doesn’t find these places quite as charming as I do. In fact, his Brazilian instincts tell him to avoid at all costs isolated buildings in the middle of nowhere that would attract location scouts for a zombie apocalypse movie. He’s waiting for somebody to walk in with a gun. I told him to relax and just assume everyone walking in has a gun.
The upside to driving in this part of the state is the road itself. There’s no traffic. It’s flat, paved, and has clearly visible lines painted on it. I could drive on those roads endlessly. After so much time spent on Brazilian roads, I forget that “bumpy” is not a given description of car rides everywhere.
The US highway system is one of my husband’s favorite things about the country. He longs to take a cross country trip in the US. By comparison, my husband avoids extended road trips in Brazil as if his life depended on it. (Statistically speaking it kind of does. Roads in Brazil are more dangerous than gangs.)
By the time we were in southern Alabama our road was a smooth, two lane stretch running straight through Eufala, the undisputed scenic highlight. Eufaula, Alabama is home to 13,000 people and the most breathtaking collection of homes. They sit right off the main (possibly only) street through town.
Mansions with wrap around porches, a turret or two, carriage houses. They line both sides of the street beckoning to tourists with their corinthian columns, tempting them to abandon reason and move to Alabama.
After Eufaula there’s not much else until Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. If you’re desperate to make those last two hours of driving pass by you can play road kill bingo. Prep your cards in advance with local species but you can only put oppossum on the card twice. They line the road like mile markers. On this trip, I spotted a raccoon, fox, armadillo, and coyote.
I drove the last hour in the pouring rain, at night, listening to the dialogue of Cinderella II for the
third time in a row. When we reached my grandparents’ house, dinner was waiting for us on the table. I considered my first road trip a resounding success.
So much so, we did it all again three days later.
