Random Road Trips

I have always loved roadtrips. I was never one of those "are we there yet?" kids. Entertaining myself was quite easy once I could read and write. Playing the alphabet game, finding lisence plates from other states, and just playing with my brothers was all the entertainment I needed.

On trips to Florida, I would locate "landmarks" along the way and write down what exits they were located near. Then I'd search for them on return trips to Florida. This led to my recording of all the establishments at each exit: restaurants, gas stations, and hotels. Then, on a return trip, I could easily look at my notes and try to convince my parents where we should stop for lunch. For example, if I wanted to eat at Arby's, I could say, "Are we going to stop for lunch soon? There's an Arby's coming up at exit 33, and there's also a Texaco, Shell, and BP where we can fill up the gas tank." I guess I just liked to be able to plan ahead like this.

As I got older and was able to drive, I enjoyed taking road trips myself. It was really my senior year in high school when my parents let me take true trips with friends (not overnight or anything, though - my parents were still responsible and didn't let me just go off roaming the stste randomly for days at a time anywhere I wanted!). I often drove to my best friend's house, which was 45 minutes away (yes, metro Atlanta is a big place), which was like taking a road trip. The two of us had gone on some road trips with her mother as well: Washington DC; Spartanburg, SC; Cave City, KY.

But back to my own road trips with no adults: we went to places that were about an hour or so from Atlanta. Twice, friends and I drove to Pendergrass, GA to go to the big antique mall. That was an all-day event. We'd go and have a picnic lunch along the way at a rest area, and then we'd walk around the antique mall, and then we'd eat dinner or just a latesnack at the Waffle House there, or at Katherine's Kitchen (a WH wannabee). I also went to Alabama once with my fiend, Alison, on December 31 to buy fireworks for New Year's Eve. And we stopped at a Waffle House along the way (see the post "Good Food Fast" for more on this obsession that is becoming evident in this post). Unfortunately, I was feeling pretty sick on the way back home, and that evening I had a fever of 103 degrees... and so did one of my brothers. But we made ourselves stay up until midnight even though we felt like crap, because we were entering the year 2000 and wanted to make sure that none of the Y2K stuff would cause the world to come to an end. Anyway, that was a random tangent, and I apologize...

In college, the random trips continued. We again drove to Alabama to buy fireworks, although this time it was only a 30 minute trip. Some other places I went during my freshman year were Royston, Macon, Dublin, and Savannah (the last two were both for St. Patrick's Day parades, the two largest ones in the state). Royston is the home of baseball great Ty Cobb. Other than that, it is a pretty pointless place to go, unless you want to buy groceries at Dill's Food City or take a photo of your boyfriend standing on the shopping cart return in the parking lot, ha ha.  That would have been one of those road trips where the trip was the whole experience, rather than the destination.  When in Macon, the annual Cherry Blossom festival was going on. We saw something pretty disturbing as part of the festival: old people on parade. There were old people dressed up for spring in their wheelchairs. One lady was dressed as the Easter bunny, for example, and one old man had pink flowers all over his wheelchair, and the funniest one: there was one wheelchair with a big, pink box with the words "Holy Bible" painted on it... and the old lady was sitting inside the box. she had a little airhole cut in the back, but she couldn't see where she was going and was probably very confused. I got a photo of some of them, but unfortunately not the lady inside the Bible.  Anyway, they called it "The Parade of Wheels" or something that sounded dignified, but I really think it was old people abuse. These are not your pets, people, to dress up and parade around town! Just because they are senile and will let you do this to them does not make it right. Sorry, another tangent...

Other college road trips include the one I took with my friend, Lisa, across North Georgia. Our goal was to go to Toccoa Falls and then Terrora Campground in Rabun County, with stops in Dahlonega and Cleveland along the way. We ended up in some scary, free campground at the bottom of a hydroelectric dam, and then decided to just go camp in somebody's backyard instead. It was okay; Lisa knew the people and her brother (who was with us) remembered how to get to their house. Nobody was home, but we pitched the tent anyways. And then they came home. And they probably thought we were freaks. But they let us sleep in their yard. This was probably the only road trip that was overnight.

I even dragged my husband on a random road trip before we were married. We were visiting his parents in TN, and we decided to drive to cave City, KY, where we'd both been before. But we took the scenic route, Hwy 31W, and saw a few Rock City Barns along the way, which I think are cool. We drove around Cave City, looking at the lame tourist attractions, and I think we stopped to ride the alpine slides. And then we got hot fudge sundaes at dairy Queen - I LOVE those! When we arrived back to his parents' town, we of course went to Waffle House for dinner.

I guess that this love of road trips was good from a financial point of view. I could've been wasting money on more expensive forms of entertainment. But this was when gas was cheaper - around a dollar a gallon. There was even one gas station on Hwy. 314 that cost about 75 cents a few times when I stopped there in early 1998! It was a good thing that gas was so cheap when I had this love of random road trips. If gas is ever that cheap again, I may have to drive Route 66 - the ultimate road trip!

The Pool Room

I wrote this description of the pool room in early 2000 for a college class. Unused for the most part due to all the kids being mostly grown up, the storage has overtaken it (at last count, 13 laundry baskets full of stuff, my brother's seats from his Camero, a painting I did in college, various mattresses, and lots of clothing). Here it is - the story of the pool room.

My family has a large room in our basement that we affectionately refer to as “the pool room.” This is because we have a pool table in there, which was in the house when my parents bought it some 23 years ago. My brothers and I have had many adventures in this room throughout our lives. Some of them have gotten us into severe trouble with our parents, and others are just kind of bizarre.

I suppose I should start off by describing the room. It is an extremely peculiar room or, at least it was, before my mother decided that its hideousness had to be remodeled into normalcy. First off, I want you to keep in mind that this room is in the basement, meaning there are other floors above it. I say this because the ceiling is, or was, paneled with Styrofoam. Upon describing this, I have had many responses of, “But doesn’t it leak in there when it rains?” To these remarks I simply restate the words “basement” and “paneled.” I then go on to explain that the walls of the pool room are paneled with bamboo, and no, the wind doesn’t blow through the cracks because there are cinder blocks between the bamboo and the outside, thus I again use the word “paneled.” I suppose this is confusing to people because bamboo and Styrofoam are not exactly what you would call home décor. So, I imagine that already you have a strange picture in your mind of what my basement looked like. It gets worse.

There is a bar in the pool room as well. Behind it, the wall used to be covered in mirrors. There were also ends of two barrels sticking out of the mirrored area, and attached to each was a weird, wooden, African-looking mask thing. It was some pretty horrid decorating, but since it had all been there when my parents first moved in, I grew up with it and thought it was pretty normal.

I spent a lot of time in the pool room, since it was like a playroom to my brothers and me. But around the time I was six years old, the tacky paneling and the presence of the pool sticks created too much temptation for my younger brother Stephen and me. It’s not that we were bad kids; we just didn’t think before acting. So each of us began jumping, armed with a pool stick pointed straight into the air. The sound of the pool sticks poking into the Styrofoam ceiling was very satisfying, and the bits of foam that began drifting down out of the holes seemed like snow to us. So we continued jumping and poking, until the ceiling was rather full of holes the size of pool stick tips. Stephen and I were having a blast, until our parents discovered what we had done.

The ceiling remained this way until we refinished the basement ten or more years later. In the meantime, it provided a conversation piece and an opportunity to get into more trouble. Paige, our neighborhood friend, was a great trouble-getter-into-er. She thought it was cool to make some of the holes above the pool table a little larger so that pool balls could fit inside. We had a few big holes that we could roll the pool balls between, like a giant pinball machine in the ceiling. The holes were pretty close together, all being above the pool table so that we could stand on it to reach the ceiling.

Did I mention that we lost one of our pool balls for a long time? For years, the whereabouts of the fifteen ball was the biggest mystery of the pool room. I was convinced that it had rolled behind the ugly green piano (also left in the house when my parents first moved in), a place we couldn’t look because of the impossibility of moving the massive piece of furniture. By the way, this is the piano in which Paige managed to get stuck while playing Hide and Seek. But I’m not here to tell Paige stories, so you can ask me about that later.

Remember how I said that we refinished the pool room? My dad bought some dry wall from Home Depot and brought it home to re-panel the walls and ceiling. I wasn’t too happy about the destruction of my childhood playroom, but my mother was determined to have the basement look un-seventies. So my father pulled all of the bamboo paneling off the walls, and then he started on the Styrofoam. As he removed one of the panels above the pool table, he heard a strange rolling sound followed by a loud clunk as the pool ball that had narrowly missed his head hit the floor behind him. Now, by this time we had stopped hanging out with Paige, but she had still almost managed to give my dad a concussion ten years later.

Those are a few of the funnier memories of the pool room. There are many more things that happened there: It was the site of Stephen’s model train set, where we played a game called “Chris and Emily” with Froster the polar bear. It was where Paige’s sister Holly got stuck in our laundry chute. Also located in the pool room was the old refrigerator that began to make poodle-like barking noises right before it died. And I won’t ever forget the half-missing ceiling panel from where my cat fell through the Styrofoam and landed in the Barbie swimming pool (which was being used by the My Little Ponies). And my brothers and I never tired of building dark haunted houses that went throughout the entire room. The pool room is the place where many of my childhood memories were made.