Remember when you were a kid, and your family went on road trips? I was a kid in the 70s and we didn't have a lot of stuff. So long car rides were punctuated by Mad Libs, a tape recorder from which my sister played the Simon & Garfunkel concert in Central Park tape for as long as the battery allowed, some archived candy stored up for the trip, license plate games, and a series of signs we would write and hold up in the window: "Help! I'm not part of this family!" "Honk if you like M&M's" "What's your name?" as if the foxy boy in the next station wagon could answer before our cars drifted apart.
Our family had a light turquoise colored Gran Fury station wagon, and the way back folded up into a two-seater. My oldest sister and I would settle in back there; my middle sister appropriately stretched out in the middle seat to sleep; my parents were in the front.
This Fourth of July, Robert and I road-tripped to Maine. In the middle seat were two good friends (one of them might be Food Guy, and one of them might be a brilliant web developer who had been to Maine only once, spent a fortune at a roadside lobster shack and hadn't been back or eaten a lobster since.)
In the way back were our bags and someone's box of fireworks (legal in New Hampshire) packed compactly, along with our two large-ish Bernese Mountain dogs. Lexa mostly settled right in, but DJ likes to be part of the party—likes to hang out with the boys. Here's the result (click on play for the video below!). While this time around I was in the front seat, I found the dog visits to the middle seat to be as entertaining as Mad Libs, and as tender as a tinny recording of Me and Julio, followed by crowds clapping in a long-ago Central Park.
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