Road Warriors

They say getting there is half the fun. With my little goofballs, that saying is somewhat true. This was a wedding I was dreading for many reasons. Obviously, I was being selfish because it was my birthday weekend and I knew I’d get the shaft, which I did, unfortunately not in the literal sense. The other thing was it’s six hours to their tiny village from our house, an hour longer than we anticipated. Their out in the middle of nowhere, beats our out in the middle of nowhere all to shit. The expense, birthday blow off, time, and the fact that I had a deadline smack-dab in the middle of the whole thing, add four people to one car for all of those hours, and poof, those are a handful of reasons I had a case of the I Can’t Wanna Gos.

In the car, the kids drove us crazy. Lane 1 wanted us to stop every time he saw a Subway, and he’d say to his father, “Get me a sammich fool.” His tactic was fruitless.

We peed at every oasis between here and there. All of those stops had a claw machine with stuffed animals crammed inside. That was Lane 2’s road obsession. “Daddy,” she always calls him Daddy when she wants something, “can I have 50 cents for the claw machine?” She batted her eyelashes at that man and he fell for it every time. She never won anything but it never discouraged her from trying at the next stop. I would not be surprised if those two kids were in cahoots, claiming they needed to use the bathroom just to get access to the claw.

During the few times we did have radio reception, it was hard to find something all of us wanted to hear. At one point, Mr. Lane got tired of changing channels and seemingly out of nowhere, we all chimed in, “De, do, do do, de, da, da, da, is all I want to say to you.” We laughed our heads off about that and when we all realized we only knew that part of the song, we laughed even harder. It kept happening but that was the only song I can remember.

Lane 2 stole my shoe and the two backseat boneheads sang into it like a microphone. “One gazillion bottles of beer on the wall…”

I begged for mercy. Mr. Lane offered to put in one of their CDs. We threatened to drop them off roadside. Thankfully, our little dorks can’t count well enough backward from one gazillion.

The kids talked nonstop until it was 3:30 a.m. when they finally fell asleep. We arrived at 4, which was just enough to give them a second wind. As we arrived, I was hating myself for agreeing to this whole thing because I was tired and crabby. We drove through their neighborhood on country back roads and encountered a lot of wildlife. One big ass doe slowly sashayed across. We had to slow down from 60 to 5 miles per hour in a few short seconds. At the side of the road waiting for her to cross was a mega buck. He was looking at us with his big ol’ head cocked to the side, as if to say, “You better not hit my bitch, bitches.”

Mr. Lane’s cell phone rang, it was Callin’ Cousin (not only a blog friend of mine but one of my old man’s cousins, sister of the bride, the only person I really knew out of the whole bunch.) and she and her old man were waiting up for us to arrive. They called to make sure we were okay and not lost or murdered by some angry deer. I realized they actually cared and probably more so than I would have if the situation was reversed. Their genuine concern for us chilled out my bad ass attitude and I finally felt happy to have my feet resting on the soil of Michigan.

Tomorrow, Mr. Lane cuts a rug, gets snookered and sings in public to his bride.