Friday, July 16
Page 15
AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)
On the Road Again…and Again…
By J’AMY PACHECO
As a desert dweller, I rarely turn down an opportunity to spend time at the seashore. So when a good friend invited me to accompany her extended family on a weekend visit to a beach some 200 miles distant, I jumped at the chance.
This beach is apparently a mecca for off-road enthusiasts, like my friend’s husband. Because it has no comfort facilities, we decided to make the weekend trip in a rented motorhome.
And what a motorhome it was—brand new and as long as a Greyhound bus, with rooms on each side that could expand in width when the vehicle was parked. It contained two television sets with videocassette and DVD players and other features too numerous to mention. It even came with a basket of little soaps.
Our motorhome joined a caravan consisting of four recreational vehicles and a trailer-pulling pickup. In the middle of the night, my friend and I piled our pajama-clad little girls into the motorhome, and we hit the road.
As I dozed on one of the couches, I noticed an unusual smell. Half asleep, I assumed it was the “fishy” smell my friend had mentioned seemed to be coming from the freezer.
But before the first 50 miles were behind us, one of the girls used the bathroom. We soon realized the smell did NOT come from the freezer, and had nothing to do with fish. It came from the potty in our palace-on-wheels.
For about an hour, we endured agony. Gagging, we opened the windows and crowded together in the front of the spacious motorhome, breathing through the fabric of our clothing.
Relief finally came when we found a truck stop that had what we needed to fix our problem. We prepared to resume our journey, but were thwarted when a vehicle in our caravan wouldn’t start.
The men who had hovered around our motorhome figuring out how to pump-and-flush now gathered under the hood of the truck. Fortunately, they’re a handy group who soon figured out what the problem was, fixed it, and jumped back into their vehicles.
Not 30 minutes had passed before the same truck suffered a blowout. It wasn’t safe to change the tire on the highway, so we caravanned slowly to another stop. It would be 30 minutes before a “tire guy” could get there with a replacement.
As my friend popped the third video into the VCR for our girls, she joked that we should have brought more movies for the drive. I briefly wondered if this was how things had started for the ill-fated Donner Party of long ago, and suggested we stop at a Blockbuster along the way—just in case. We could always return the videos on the way home.
Not long after we resumed our trip, we noticed a member of our caravan pulling to the side of the winding road. A wry voice came over the walkie-talkie: the vehicle’s brakes were failing.
While the guys in our group scratched their heads under the hood of that vehicle, my friend worried that I might regret my decision to travel with her family. I assured her I wouldn’t.
Ultimately, it took nine hours to make the drive to the beach—where we immediately became stuck in the sand. A nice guy in a sporty pickup truck pulled us out. He rescued another member of our caravan as well, who was so happy to be free and so afraid of getting stuck again that he drove off without his wife.
Oops.
Amidst the sheer insanity resulting from a bazillion off-road and recreational vehicles converging on this uncontrolled beach campground, we managed to circle our wagons into an enormous compound, inside of which we stashed our children. We hauled water the short distance from the ocean to fill a small plastic wading pool we’d brought—and I narrowly escaped being squashed by a quad driver who was balancing on two side wheels.
Things were good—until the toilet in our motorhome clogged. But innovators that we’d become, we soon figured out how to use a metal rod meant for opening the motorhome’s awning to fix our ongoing problem.
Sunday, with warning lights on both our fresh water and “ick” tanks, we started our journey home. Almost immediately, the five-year-old with us threw up. My friend lamented that I’d surely never go with them anywhere again.
The truth is, it was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. To be surrounded by good friends and feel like part of a big family; to find humor and resourcefulness in challenging situations—what could be more adventurous? And unlike the Donner Party, nobody got eaten.
I loved every minute of it, and I’d travel with them to the ends of the Earth. Come to think of it, it feels like I already did…
Copyright 2004, Metropolitan News Company