Har She Blows

With no further ado: Roadtrip - The Film.



OK, here's some further ado.

The trip was fantastic. Met Jayne's boyfriend Brian, who appears in the video and who is just the swellest guy. Did a lot of roaming around in the incredibly fecund and vibrant natural world of Gays Mills, WI. Seriously - the birds you see are a darker, deeper hue, they come closer in to the house at the bird feeder, they call with a deeper and more intense trumpeting sound...In any given five-minute span, I could have stood at the end of my Dad's driveway and seen a bald eagle, a sandhill crane, Canada geese, and a pileated and red-breasted woodpecker, all of them (except the geese) nesting within a few hundred yards. It was like being on safari. I didn't appreciate it when I lived there - I feel like now I should go back there just to soak it all in.

The kids loved the 4-wheeler. I took them up over the hill and showed them the exact spots where I killed the two deer whose skulls adorn our stairwell. Q in particular was absolutely rapt when I told him about them, particularly the one I had to trail for several hours before I finally caught up to him. However, when my Dad gave me the .22 rifle he bought when he was a gradeschooler for $16 and I ran outside to shoot it, I shouted over my shoulder, "Q, wanna go shoot a gun?" He looked at me like I was crazy. "No, no way," he said. But Tie leaped up from her Barbie dolls. "I DO!" So she and I walked out to where the garden used to be and put some holes in a plastic ice cream pail lid.

The secret to a successful all-day drive is to go no more than 525 miles, and to do so with at most 3 stops, 2 if possible. Eat on the move - why sit in the restaurant when you can sit in the car and gain 1/2 hour? Also: Drive a car that lets you stop pretty much only because you have to pee. On our good days we were on the road by 7:00 AM and out of the car by 4:30 or 5:00. We did have one bad day, where I hurried out of the house without getting the kids to the bathroom, and Tie wet herself as she slept 40 minutes later; then we had to stop to buy a cooler for the venison Dad sent us home with; then again for lunch, early, because I had a splitting headache and had to stop the car anyway to dig out my medication from the back; and again to get gas, because I had neglected to do that at the lunch stop, possibly addled by my headache; and at the end I stayed on 80 instead of veering off on 90 to where the hotel was, thus tacking another hour onto an already long day. That one was bad. The other 3, though, were peaches.

I've spent 3 evenings now on the film and the uploading and the blogging, so I have to knock it off now. I'll titilate y'all with some more witticisms at some future date. It'll be worth the wait, I promise.