Life on my own #22 - Road tripping

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

Inked by Sarah (Ein­se­len) at 7:43 p.m.

Two week­ends ago I expe­ri­enced a strange, almost extrater­res­trial cir­cum­stance. A hun­dred bright red eyes kept blink­ing at me, in uni­son, as I took a high­way off-ramp.

Blink. Blink. Blink. At exact inter­vals, for equal amounts of time, the sky lit up with the gaze of a hun­dred sta­tion­ary Cyclops.

I mean, wind­mills. Or what­ever they call those mon­u­ments to Energy 2.0.

The high­way off-ramp was a byprod­uct of an impromptu visit I made to my cousins in Indi­ana. These are the same cousins to whom I’ve only grown closer as we’ve matured into adult­hood, and some of the few peo­ple on earth I’m com­pletely com­fort­able around. So even though they live almost four hours away (by car), it’s worth the eight-hour round trip to see them more than the min­i­mum four times a year. And now that most of us are of dri­ving age, we can exer­cise our free will to make that hap­pen. Three cheers for Wes­leyan Arminianism!

Partly because the visit was rel­a­tively unpremed­i­tated, I could not take either of my sib­lings, or my par­ents for that mat­ter. No biggie—there are just two bad things about tak­ing a road trip by myself. One is that I have to drive the whole way. I’d much rather be chauf­fered around my whole life. In fact, one of the absolutely-imperative-non-negotiables on my “per­fect hus­band” check­list is that he must enjoy dri­ving. And fill­ing up the tank.

The other thing about road trip­ping alone is that I have to enter­tain myself. My sis­ter can’t sit in the side seat and tell me silly sto­ries if she’s stuck back home in clin­i­cals or wher­ever. But the CD player really saves the day here.

First came the Billy Joel CD. I’ve prob­a­bly lis­tened to this thing enough to sing the lyrics to all the songs on it, except for the first track, which isn’t so much my style. (Why do we still call songs on CDs or mp3 albums “tracks”? Audio hasn’t been played from phys­i­cal tracks since, like, the 1980s.) I thought, later, that it might not have been the smartest thing to sing along to every­thing I heard from my CD player on this road trip. I could’ve ended up with a raspy voice the whole weekend.

But that didn’t stop me from pop­ping in a Rich Mullins CD or one from The Asso­ci­a­tion. Prob­a­bly a Stephen Cur­tis Chap­man com­pi­la­tion too. He sounds over­pro­duced though. (See how audio-savvy I am? toss­ing around the tech­ni­cal jar­gon like I know what it means!)

Almost an hour and a half before my journey’s end, I decided to quit the CD kick and catch up on my pod­casts. This one pod­cast I fol­low has episodes over an hour long, so the only other time I lis­ten to them is when I’m wash­ing a week’s worth of dishes or try­ing (and fail­ing) to go to sleep.

No head­phones allowed on the dri­ver when she’s dri­ving, you know, so I’ve learned to prop my iPhone-cum-iPod on my shoul­der, some­times anchored by the seat­belt, some­times in my col­lar. That way the speaker is close enough to my ear to be heard above the 3,000-plus rev­o­lu­tions per minute.

I wish I had one of those doohick­eys that plugs your iPod into the cig­a­rette lighter and broad­casts its sig­nal on a short-range FM chan­nel. (The range? Prob­a­bly about six inches. You don’t even need a ham radio license.) I could lis­ten to pod­casts over the car’s audio sys­tem and spare myself a shoul­der ache from bal­anc­ing the iPod. Go-go-gadget per­sonal audio haven! But you know what? Being cre­ative is cheaper than buy­ing gadgets.

I might even be able to wait until iPod Doohickey 2.0 is released before my shoul­der locks up. It’ll be the green version—getting its power from minia­ture wind­mills pro­pelled by your car’s heat/AC system.

It’ll even have a lit­tle red light so the minia­ture planes don’t smash into it.

Sarah Ein­se­len is crazy enough to go home and write in her spare time after she’s spent the day doing the same thing at work. But she’s made her peace with it. Sarah main­tains a per­sonal blog at readersis.blogspot.com.

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Feb 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.