There are no words.

I love travelling more than I love most things on this earth, and that may be simply because I haven’t yet had a true tourism nightmare. I’ve been through some pretty major delays, flown through terrible storms, endured overnight flights with no sleep for 36 hours—but nothing traumatic enough to keep me out of the air. The car however, is a completely different story.
I have always dreamt of experiencing the glamorous pre-college road trip with my friends, that’s been dramatized so well in countless chick flicks and young adult novels. However, I’m fairly certain that fantasy is completely elusive.

Every winter we head down to D.C. to spend the few days after Christmas with my father’s side of the family. I look forward to it every year, because the six hour drive is trivial compared to some things in this world, and my cousins are some of the greatest people I know. A few years back, as we headed down the New Jersey turnpike, my fantastic “singing” (I call it that loosely) filling the empty space in the ten year old silver minivan, we encountered a bit of a problem. Well, more than a bit, because the car just stopped working; at a toll booth; as we approached the Delaware bridge. Yeah, that is a problem. Roadside assistance is supposed to assist you, correct? Well in the amount of time that we waited for “Roadside Assistance” to live up to their title, I could have completed a short marathon, written a book, learned a new language…etc. When we are finally able to secure a tow truck, which I’m pretty sure I paid for with some of my Christmas money, we are hoisted onto the back of the flatbed while still inside of our broke-down van. People really do look at you like you’re crazy when they see things like that.
So we get to this "highly reccommended 'repair shop' ” which is really a junk yard complete with “BEWARE OF DOG” signs surrounding the vehicles currently being worked on. I feel great about this place, really. The office, even that much classier, is a small trailer with (I’m assuming they were strays) several cats wandering its very limited length (I’m also not a cat person.) My father is in and out, engaged in an intense discussion with the repair man about what could be wrong with his 10 year old vehicle, operating with 200,000+ miles. I mean….what couldn’t be wrong? To my surprise, we’re only there for a few short hours before they clear us to get back on the road. I just wasn’t buying it.

We reach the exact location of our previous breakdown, before the van starts making a “help me, I’m dying” type noise. Yeah, I'm not surprised at all. We quickly swerve off of the exit, and are now stranded—again. Several minutes, and another tow truck later (free of charge), we are back at the ever wonderful repair shop. Did I mention how hungry I am by this point? They tell my father he’ll have to leave the van with them, in DELWAWARE (we live in upstate New York) until further notice, because there are more issues than they had originally thought. They insist that the least they can do is bring us to a truck stop, where we can get something to eat. I am not really a truck stop type of girl. However, I became wonderfully acquainted with the fantastic institution in the, let’s say, six hours we waited there for my Aunt and Uncle to come retrieve us.

The van ended up staying in Delaware for a good two weeks, while they played around with it, and I mean that literally. It took 75% of that time for them to determine what the actual problem was, and I still think they made something up. Amazingly, that same van lasted up until last week, when my father finally purchased a new vehicle, one that I will happily travel in, with my fingers crossed the entire time.