Are We There Yet?

Thought up:  4.29.02 – 11:41am

Written: 4.30.02 – 1:27pm

#6

When I was young my family used to go on vacations.  We didn’t have a lot of money, so our vacations would usually include one or more of the following:

1.)     Sleeping in the car as opposed to a hotel or campground.

2.)     Not really going anywhere, but more just driving around for 2 days, and stopping at rest areas and monuments and such.

3.)     “Vacationing” to gramma’s house.

4.)     Eating the 45 Shasta-smashed-bologna sandwiches packed in a hand me down green cooler in the trunk of our beautiful, spacious, stealthy 1989 LTD Crown Victoria.  (By “stealthy” I mean stealthy like a hippopotamus on fire.)

5.)     Me getting beat up by my parents for beating up my sister because I couldn’t beat up my brother, who had just beaten me up… yea, I got beat up a lot.  It was a lose-lose situation, but I guess I never quite figured that one out.

When you’re a kid, you always want to be able to know where you are, when you’re getting to where you’re going, and when you could just stop and get out of the car.  Well, for years, as every kid does, we’d ask, “Are we there yet?”  And for years, my dad would always use the reply,

“Almost, just a few more miles.”

Isn’t that what he’s supposed to say?  That’s what they always say, but we’d always just come back 5 minutes later,

“Are we there yet?”

Until apparently one day my old man got to thinking about it, he was ready for us to ask the inevitable question.

“Are we there yet?”

He looked back in that rearview mirror, raised up one eyebrow, smiled to show all of his off-white teeth, (kinda like that Grinch, when he finally realizes he could steal Christmas away from all the Whos in Whoville, and he starts to rub his hands in a circle, like when one dries their hands under one of those automatic dryers in McDonalds…) and said, much to our disbelief,
”Yup.  We’re just looking for a parking place.”

Uhhhhh, what does a kid say to that?  Because technically we ARE there, because he said so.  And in our family, for all we knew, the vacation COULD lead to this very location on the highway.  So for at least the next 3 or 4 trips, we had no clue how to respond to that one.  We’d just gaze out the window and look for something that we might stop at, never really knowing where we’d stop.  Boy, kids sure are dumb.  I hope I never become one…