Vacation: Part One

It was the Summer of 2007. (Can’t you just hear the ominous music in the background?!) I had just received my driver’s license, so for the first time, I’d be able to help my mom drive on our annual road trip out East. (I’m sure you can hear it now.) In honor of the occasion, we set off on a more elaborate trip than usual, stopping at colleges and detouring for large balls of yarn and billboards turned cow-gods.

 
 

 
 

After one such detour to the Ben & Jerry’s Factory, we called ahead to a hotel we found in the AAA book and made reservations for the evening. It was only a couple hours up the highway, so my mom graciously handed over the wheel and took a nap. (The ominous music is blaring now, just in case you were wondering.)

 
 

A few hours later, after expending every ounce of my energy trying to keep the car on the highway that just happened to lack reflective lane markers, my mother woke up and realized we’d waaay missed our exit. Not only that, but the two opposite lanes of traffic were separated by the dense Vermont forest, so we would have to go to the next exit to turn back around.

 
 

Of course, humans don’t exist in Vermont, so it was another hour before we came across the next exit. At which point I finally look down at the dash.

 
 

 
 

The empty light screamed at me like I was an idiot. “No big deal,” my mom says. Right.

 
 

We decide we might as well keep going and take the left fork jutting off from the exit. My mom pulls out the map to locate ourselves. Sure enough, neither our handy little exit nor our current road through the moonlit forest makes an appearance on the map.

 
 

Better yet, when my mom decides to call someone back home to look our location up online or call the hotel for directions or alert 911 that we’re dying or something, we discover that we’re out of cell range.

 
 

BEST yet?

 
 

The left fork dead ends.

 
 

 
 

In an abandoned factory complex.

 
 

Guillermo del Toro would have so much fun with this story.

 
 

We turn the car around, double checking that the doors are locked, and go back up the road to where it had forked.

 
 

This type of what-can-you-do scenario has odd effects on my mother and myself, so we found ourselves cycling through bouts of manic panic (this should SO be a phrase) and anxious hysterics. Unfortunately it was like listening to the radio with your windshield wipers on when the song’s tempo is slightly slower than the windshield wipers, so every couple measures they match up, but for the most part they are totally out of sync.

 
 

What my super-long analogy is trying to say is that more often than not, one of us would pee our pants from fright while the other peed their pants from laughter.

 
 

So we drive down the road cycling through emotional extremes and not encountering another living soul. The forest was exceedingly dark, blocking out even the moon and looking unbelievably terrifying.

 
 

Then, we saw this:

 
 

 
 

At which point my mother thinks it would be HILARIOUS to yell “Sasquatch.”

 
 

In my manic panic, I see this:

 
 

 
 

and scream bloody freaking murder.

 
 

Two minutes later my heart attempts to return to a normal speed and we continue down the road. You’ll be happy to know we sputtered right on into a small train junction town, complete with gas station, hotel and only a few scruffy creepers. So all in all, we survived the night without a physical scratch.

 
 

Mentally… that’s another story. I now have a ridiculous phobia of Sasquatch.  Thanks ever so much, Mom.