Do The Charleston, Chapter 1: Graceful Road Rage

This past weekend's patriotic sojourn southward began with my least favorite activity in the world, ever, so help me Gawd, amen. Now, I have never given birth, eaten chitlins, or sat through an entire N*Sync concert, but I do not believe that I could loathe any of these activities any more than I mega-loathe being in the car. I can handle up to about three hours of four-wheeled confinement -just long enough to get to Blacksburg, Home of the Hokies, and ooze into the nearest bar- but after that I start to come apart at the seams, bits and pieces of my sanity littering the car like the cheap, greasy gas station popcorn that I insist on buying for car trips. Road trips. Bad for my sanity, bad for my cholesterol.

Before we even got on the road, I could hear the orchestra warming up for the opening act of "Motor Doom" in the back of my mind: Holiday weekend traffic would clog up I-95 faster than I could scream "Get out of my lane, you scraggly slut!!!" turning a seven-hour trip into a sixteen-hour slog through the darker recesses of my vocabulary. I don't think I'm known for a sparkling, clean vocabulary safe for preschoolers and the dainty, but new guests to my Jeep are often shocked and horrified by the demons that screech out of my mouth in heavy traffic. Well, not even in heavy traffic. All you really have to do is hesitate at a traffic stop long enough to make me think that I might miss out on the beacon of hope that is the green light, and in decibels rivaling a sonic boom, I will proceed to insult your hair color, religion, mother, clothing choices, pets, and unborn children. In that order, and in furious, red-faced profanity.

Lawyer Boy and I managed to schlep our shizz out the front door of our house only forty-five minutes behind schedule, which is pretty decent for a household that may as well not own a clock. We could be more punctual if we only timed ourselves using a sundial, and that is saying a lot, since as far as sundials go, I do not even know which way is up. We loaded the Labradozer into her seat in the back, perched my perfect chocolate cake precariously on top of our luggage, and set the tripometer to zero, so we could watch every one of the 419.9 miles of our odyssey roll by. I am a glutton for punishment.

The tripometer had not even registered 5.5 miles before we came to an infuriating standstill, parked on the ramp from the Downtown Expressway onto I-95 South. As far as we could see, cars attempting to flee the city for a carefree holiday weekend were stalled, their pilots simmering from the stress of moving .02 miles in half an hour.

I started to get a little twitchy. I perhaps suggested not less than sixteen times, as casually as I could, that maybe we could turn around, cancel the trip, and get ourselves a nice baby pool from Target for a grand staycation in the comfort of our backyard. Maybe I banged the steering wheel a bit. Maybe there were tears.

This is just a thought, but if you are twelve minutes into a seven hour road trip and you find yourself on the roof of your car, naked, throwing your cute pointy shoes at the car in front of you and shrieking, "BITCH I WILL CUT YOU!!!" as a result of a perceived traffic slight, you should perhaps consider changing your travel plans. Either you change your travel plans, or the state troopers and their Tazers will, is all I'm saying.

Traffic crawled for an hour. I eventually stopped crying, put my clothes back on, and resumed my duties as diligent driver. The nice lady in the car in front of us even graciously returned my shoes. (I so would not have.) I smoldered in an angry little pile of hate, cursing Henry Ford, GM, Honda, and anyone else I could blame for the proliferation of the automobile in America. I went so far as to flip the bird at the Richmond Raceway sign as we trolled past it.

Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, as we passed through the cesspool of disease that is Petersburg (motto: "Clap If You're Clappy!"), traffic lifted. All the other cars disappeared! Dumbledore must have heard my prayers, and swooped in to save me. The road opened up and we were free to fly through the next 400 miles of the trip. Of course, after that point, LB offered to drive. My sciatic nerve -medical Latin for "whiny thigh"- was bugging me, and I think the dark curses I was muttering under my breath were bothering him. He took over at the helm, and I spent the next six hours trying to get comfortable in the mixing bowl-sized passenger seat.

I never succeeded, but we did eventually make it to Charleston.

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Tomorrow, I promise The Tale of the T.P. Penitentiary, complete with pictures!