I have four laundry baskets and zero ideas on what to wear in a Houstonian November. I worry as I pack my bag an hour before we’re supposed to leave. 70 degrees? I don’t remember what that’s like… I really should’ve packed before now. I always do this, I always regret it and I always end up packing way too much. I bring a bag of clothes, a bag of electronics and stuff to do in the car, my camera bag, my backpack, my makeup bag… And then there’s three other people in the car too? And they’re bringing some of their belongings? How is this going to work?

Like this, I guess. I sit in the second row and my sister Georgia in the third. The whole left side is open – you know, until it’s stuffed with luggage.

And off we go, riding into the sunset. (Just kidding, it’s 1:59 p.m.) We are bold and naïve to the horrors a 24 hour car ride can bring. We didn’t go to Houston last year because it was two weeks after I got sick, so our minds have glossed over the worst parts and presented us with a more idyllic picture. This picture holds for the first few hours – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Georgia suddenly looks up from her iPad as I take the above picture.

“Why is my iTunes broken? Some of the songs are all grey.”

“Oh, G, you just have to download them over WiFi.”

“Well, that doesn’t help me now!”

It’s time to work on my essay for Advanced World Lit. *sigh* It’s due at the end of the day. I’m just hoping we get to the hotel in time to submit it because I don’t know if Turnitin works on my phone. *sigh*

We’re around an hour in, still having fun at this point and taking a lot of silly pictures.

We drive through Missouri and into Oklahoma. I take a nap, so I don’t remember much. Other uneventful things happened. Let’s skip ahead.

“Where should we eat?” my dad asks.

“How about… Well, the #1 restaurant on AroundMe in Tulsa is Sushihana,” my mom responds. “Let’s check it out!”

I’m not one for sushi, so I get shrimp teriyaki. And it is delicious.

I open my computer and am faced with a dreadful sight. “WARNING: LOW BATTERY. 7% REMAINING.” Oh, goodness gracious. At least my dad has brought his work computer. I snap a picture on my phone and spend 10 minutes retyping it. To be honest, I’m kind of sick of writing at this point. It’s hard to write in a car, you know? I don’t get carsick or anything, but it’s just hard to focus.

It’s dark outside. I’m sore from sitting so long. How much longer until we get to the hotel?

“How much longer until we get to the hotel?”

“About two hours.”

I groan. Then I laugh so my mom knows I’m joking. It’s too dark for her to see my face clearly, and we’re both too tired to move toward each other to see each other’s faces at all.

We arrive at our hotel, utterly exhausted. We lug our luggage (is that a pun? I hope so) up the elevator and down the hall. Our room is nice and spacious, and I rush to plug in my computer and finish editing my essay.

IT IS COMPLETE! AND SUBMITTED! I feel an overwhelming, somewhat unreasonable sense of pride and accomplishment. Overwhelming because it’s 11:43 p.m. and I’m quite tired, and unreasonable because it’s 11:43 p.m. and I probably should have done this earlier. But it’s too late to change that now. It’s also too late to do much of anything now, and Mom’s started to tell me to go to sleep, so I do.

No matter how much I complain about road trips, I really do love them. I get to spend quality time with my family, and we’re always going somewhere nice. Road trips would be so terrible if you ended up somewhere awful. The good thing is, we took a nice trip to a nice destination, and it was well worth the drive.

(Obligatory moral-at-the-end-of-the-story-so-this-post-wasn’t-just-useless-babblings out of the way: I kind of wish we could’ve flown. Planes are fun, man.)