Cornelia's Cross-Country Survival Kit
Apr 19 '00
From 1967 to 1976, I had a parent on either coast of this fair land. That meant, basically, getting back East somehow each and every summer. My sister and I racked up our fair share of then useless frequent flyer miles, to be sure, but we also went by car on a few occasions. Freya still hates road trips to this day, but somehow I caught the urge to make my odometer smoke, and have continued to head out onto the open road at the drop of a hat.
There are many different types of roadtrip. Going with my mom means you'll spend each night with friends, since she collects people like Green Stamps no matter where she goes. When we were kids, we'd fill in the gaps with KOA campgrounds, which were always a trip. These are a good place to go if you've got kids ages seven and up, since there's usually a pool and a bunch of other kids hanging out, who've also been cooped up in cars all day. Everybody gets to blow off a little steam and socialize, which is refreshing for all concerned.
Mom's pace is leisurely--she rarely makes more than 250 miles a day, making a true cross-country jaunt take several weeks. To some this might seem painfully slow, but Mom likes a good garage sale, and always has an eye out for a funky and intriguing reason to pull over and walk around. These days, she spends at least a month a year touring the country in her tiny camper, often parking to sleep in the lots of hospitals, which she says are safe and relatively quiet.
As I've gotten older, I've done some more pedal-to-the-metal trips, where I absolutely, positively had to be somewhere on time, usually on short notice. I went from New York City to Boulder in four days, several years ago, with my foster sister and my ten-month-old twins. I also did pretty quick tours from Colorado to California and back alone, twice, when the kids were under two, on the road for three or four day stretches each way.
During all of this driving, I've learned a few items of journeycraft which I will here pass along to my fellow travelers.
1. Bring Your Own Music
Unless you are one of those weirdos who likes to drive in complete silence, or truly feel that you'll have fresh and sprightly conversation to share with passengers and driving partners for hours on end, do yourself a favor and bring some tunes. I remember the summer of '76 chiefly for being unable to escape what I think is a Gordon Lightfoot song about sundown and some cheating woman. It was on every station of the AM radio all day, every day, and it's a miracle one of us didn't take a baseball bat to the dashboard.
Even when you're near a metropolitan area, radio can be really, really bad. If your car doesn't have a tapedeck or a CD player, bring a boombox. You can get an adapter to plug it in to the cigarette lighter.
If you're planning on serious driving, bring no less than ten tapes or CDs. Even your favorite song will gnaw at your entrails after a thousand miles. I still prefer tapes, as I can make different mixes of songs I actually like. Listening to a half-good CD all the way through is torture, and you don't want to be flipping through discs while you're driving.
I always bring a little bit of classical stuff (say the Emperor Concerto or the Four Seasons), some pounding rock for the Salt Flats (Velvet Underground, Hendrix), and "Dueling Banjos." That last song can cheer you right up if the idea of another dinner at Bob Evans or The Cracker Barrel is wearing on you.
Books on tape can be a godsend, but hard to sell to a mixed group. I conveniently "forgot" Dr. Seuss's ABC in a rest stop somewhere in Nevada. Go for something like The Hobbit if you've got mixed ages. Driving alone, though, is made infinitely better by having a good unabridged work handy. One friend's sister managed to listen to the complete works of Dickens during the year she was teaching at Cornell and her husband at Harvard.
This is not to say that you should never turn your radio on. It's an important slice of local culture to take in, no matter where you are. One of our favorite family stories involves a road trip to Maine, where a local announcer one midnight related that a Miss Emily Cotton, age 93, had just been involved in a "spectacular one car crash."
The good stuff is usually all the way over to the left of your dial--whether it's NPR, wacky religious freaks, or University stations. Catching the news once in a while is a good idea, as you can be travelling in a little space bubble while on a long trip, and completely miss breaking stories like the invasion of Kuwait or crop circles in Japan or whatever.
2 Bring Beverages--Lots of 'Em
First and foremost, if you're a coffee drinker, be prepared for what you'll be offered on the road to suck. While you won't have access to a stove unless you're traveling by camper, you can make some decent espresso over a fire in any campground with a stovetop machine. Make a huge batch in the morning and put it in a thermos, if you want some during the day.
A good cheat on this is to bring a jar of Medaglia D'Oro instant espresso and doctor the diner cup with a spoonful to bring it up to speed. I found this invaluable while traveling with Mom, who drinks Postum.
For summer trips, a gallon or so of just plain water is essential, especially if you're driving in the desert or anywhere humid. If you bring along a can of instant lemonade powder or iced tea mix, you'll save big bucks on the road. Buy a couple of bottles with a "sport" top before you leave home, and mix your own drinks in these as you travel. I prefer the kind you get filled with Gator-Ade or something in a 7-11 to a "real" water bottle for biking, since the former are see-through and easier to clean in between servings.
Mom always brings a jar of white wine, since she likes a glass in the evening. She keeps this in her cooler, and it's a lot easier to reseal than a wine bottle. If you do bring any type of liquor, keep it in the trunk while you're driving. Even if you're not drinking while driving, having it in the car with you can be a problem.
3. Snacks and Road Food
Eating can be a great way to kill the monotony of driving. Pretzels are good, since they won't make your hands greasy and you don't end up covered in crumbs as you tend to do with potato chips or more crumbly stuff. Sour hard candies make a good occasional treat.
The best thing for the road, though is fruit--either fresh or dried. There are not a lot of sources of Vitamin C in the heartland, I've found, and a nice Granny Smith apple is easy to eat while driving, refreshing, and, um, will help to keep you regular after you've been sitting all day.
When you're actually stopping for meals, I think trying to find regional food is a great way to get a little culture. You've seen one Stuckey's, you've seen 'em all. Jane and Michael Stern's excellent book Road Food is a must for all travelers, as it highlights the best of the local foodstuffs and purveyors around the country.
If you want to pick up cheap gifts while on the road, hit the condiment aisle of any grocery store. Chances are you'll find a barbecue sauce, jam, mustard or salad dressing you've never seen before, and one or two of these make an excellent hostess gift if you'll be stopping in on any friends en route. Some of my finds have been so good I've wanted to retrace my route to pick up more, such as the outrageously tasty Matouk's Kuchela, a spicy relish of grated green papaya in a vinegar marinade, which I picked up in Delray Beach, Florida.
If you don't like bland food, bring a bottle of Tabasco with you should you plan to tour the Midwest. I picked up this tip from Korean students at a boarding school where I once taught, and the stuff really can make everything from mac and cheese to bad pizza taste a whole lot more like food.
If you'll be cooking at KOA style places, bring some charcoal and some decent dried stuff, as well as cans, and for God's sake don't forget a pot and some spoons that aren't plastic. Ramen noodles are easy to cook, as are any type of canned chili or pork and beans.
My dad, who actually lived in his VW camper for 13 years, made a science of portable foodstuffs that needed nothing but slight refrigeration. He kept a medium sized cooler under the bed platform he built, and always had a jar of Hellman's mayo in there (Best Foods if you're in the West). His favorite meal was tuna sandwiches on pita bread (unleavened bread takes up less space), and he always had a crop of alfalfa sprouts growing so he had access to cheap greens. Sprouts grow well in the dark, and all you need to get them started are seeds, water, and a jar. A handy wipe type towel and a rubber band over the mouth of the jar make a good sieve for rinsing the sprouts as they grow. Of course, the jars he used were old Hellman's ones, which are a nice size for a mobile sprout farm.
4. Tools, Utensils, and Car Stuff
You absolutely have to bring a Swiss Army knife, with as many little blades as possible. I have done everything with these things from slicing brie to fixing my car--okay, actually my husband fixed the car, but you know what I mean.
A first aid kit is never a bad idea, and if you've got little kids be sure to bring liquid Tylenol and a thermometer. You will be SOL if your kid gets a fever at a Motel 6 in the middle of Darkest Kansas at three in the morning.
I suppose a road kit with flares and everything wouldn't be a bad idea, though I've never travelled with one. Spare hoses and extra oil are always a great backup to have on hand, as is some Windex and a roll of paper towels. I don't depend on the blue stuff in the car reservoir, especially in the summer when it's buggy--mosquitoes and gnats tend to smear rather nastily when you run the wipers over them. Plus, having a squeaky clean windshield takes a lot of the eyestrain out of night driving. Do try to change your wiper blades just before you start out on a long trip, however. These are hugely expensive on the road and a pain to replace. The gas station will never have the ones that match the make and model of your car, trust me--that will be the one empty little hook on the pegboard.
5. Weapons and Stuff
As to self defense... Mom used to bring a pistol with us when we were kids, which thankfully we never had occasion to use. Now she has a can of mace hanging from the rearview mirror, because we made her do something. You are not allowed to bring Mace into Canada. Mom hid hers under some bushes next to the border station and then picked it up on her way back after a day trip. Never, ever, joke with border guards about having "a million AK-47s" in your trunk. My cousin did this once, and spent the next six hours having his car taken apart.
You are also not allowed to bring any produce into the state of California, and will be questioned and sometimes searched when coming in to the state, especially around Lake Tahoe, for some reason. Drugs are your own lookout--though if you've got prescription stuff, make sure it's in the appropriate bottles from the pharmacy.
6. Entertainment and Home Comforts
Mom, like George W., always brings her pillow with her. I always bring one because I like to sleep with two pillows, and motels only ever have one a person.
If you've got kids, bring a few things they can play with at rest stops. Jump ropes, big bottles of bubbles and several wands, a frisbee... anything that can get the blood moving again. If you let them go nuts outside for ten or fifteen minutes every couple of hours, everyone will be happier, even when you're trying to make good time. Bubbles were great for my kids when they were two--I'd blow some for them, and they'd run after them trying to pop them. Make sure you do not try this in the dog run. You will reget it.
Our favorite car game was always Geography. If you've never played this, one person says a place name out loud, and the next person has to come up with a place name that starts with the last letter of the previous word, like Florida-Alps-Saskatchewan. Somehow you can always get into log runs of words that begin and end with "A." Do not say "Phoenix" unless you're tired of the game or playing with people who are intimately familiar with villages in Mainland China.
For an older crowd, the Name Game is much more fun. This is similar to Geography, except that the person whose turn follows yours must come up with a celebrity (fictional or real) whose first name starts with the first letter of the aforementioned celebrity's last name: Gerald Ford, Frank Sinatra, Seamus Heaney. One word names, like Cher or Mowgli, use the first letter of the single name for the next turn. Names which have the same initial for first and last name make the direction of play reverse, and if you're lucky, you can get into little duels with people: Mickey Mouse, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mantle, Mighty Mouse, etc.
So that's about it for my roadtrip kit... There are tons of other things you should probably bring, but I always forget them. Have a great time and, as my Mom always says, "talk to strangers!"
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Member: Cornelia Read
Location: Berkeley, California
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About Me:
Disorganized mother of twins by day, crime fiction writer by... um... day.
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