Road Trips: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Road Trips- The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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[00:00:16] Nasreen: Hi, my name's Nasreen. We are here with another episode of Time to Talk Travel and we've got Des, Ciaran, Mo and myself here today. We are going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of road trips. Pretty much everyone has done one at some point in time, whether it was because they chose it or it was just the only way to get somewhere. Leading off, we would love to talk about what goes well on road trips. What is the good side of road tripping?

Des, do you have good road trip tips?

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I love my kids, don't get me wrong, but I also don't love them. Eight hours in a car stuck. Talking, blah, blah. Those days are mostly behind me . And I am not shy about going all by myself. I love a good road trip all alone. Good music or podcasts playing in the background. Sometimes, and I've done this quite often, turning down the volume on everything. I used to not get silence in my life, and I loved getting in the car and having no one talk to me and no music, nothing. I've discovered it's much easier to pass the time with something playing in the background when I go by myself. But, it's all about who you take.

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[00:02:01] Maureen: true. I love the conversations. I love that when you're in that space after they've had a good snooze, with your teens, especially, you get like a full download of everything going on in their life. And they have nowhere to go. They're bored and . They just share everything. So that's always a good one. Sometimes I'm like, maybe I'm overdue for a road trip to get the 4 1 1 on what's going on with the kids right now.

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[00:02:39] Maureen: Yep. There's a lot of good conversations that come out in the car and you can't run away either.

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It was just the most efficient way to get to some places, and I really actually enjoyed the time alone. And now even as a parent with a lot of kids, I like to step away sometimes into the serenity of my minivan. But I think some of the things for us, having driven between Texas and New Hampshire a lot

were little rules that we instituted that made things go smoother, so someone goes to the bathroom. Everyone goes to the bathroom. We don't stop for two hours after we start. That's the rule. No stops for two hours. Everybody tries to go when we stop, we are synchronizing our bladders. And then the other one is flip-flopping, the expected screen time.

We would hold off as much as possible. So during the daylight they would do crafty things and coloring. During the nighttime, they could use their screens, but it was the opposite for whoever sat in the front seat. So my oldest teenage son, that would be when we would talk or he would play DJ because I can't have the screen glowing next to me in the dark.

So he got his screen earlier.

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How does this podcast know where I am?

But I was thinking that would be really cool

if the podcast knew where you are and you're like, Hey, do you want to learn some tidbits about where you are right now? Yes.

Yes, I do.

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[00:05:10] Maureen: That's a great idea. When I used to drive to sailing with my son a lot, we had this playlist that was like the , keep mom awake

'cause we gotta haul through and get there . And it was all like Latin music and energy. It was like, gotta keep going.

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[00:05:28] Maureen: driver has veto. I'll give you that much.

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[00:05:35] Desiree: I, when my kids were little, it was always Disney songs. And they all knew every single word to every Disney song. So it was often a concert in the backseat. And I'm talking, 12 year age gap between them, but they really got into every Disney album. They had hit a point probably three or four hours in where I'm like, okay. Enough of that, there was that cursed period where the littlest one loved kids bop and I Nope. Couldn't do that for longer than an hour, nope. For so many years they had the movies playing in the DVD on the back seat, and I'd heard so much of Barbie in Paris.

Barbie is a murder. Mermaid.

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I've heard all of them.

My kids now, in their twenties, when we have holidays and they all get together, watch all the old Barbie Fairytopia

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[00:06:27] Maureen: Yeah, they can sing the song,

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[00:06:36] Nasreen: I.

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[00:06:38] Nasreen: So I have to say the one fun thing too with the music, or this is the weird musical story from Road Tripping is my son was maybe like 16 at the time , and he was like, I heard this music with this fire beat and I don't know what it is. And so it became the mission of the road trip.

We spent hours with him playing things, me naming songs, him pulling them up. No, that's not it. That's not it. I cannot tell you the amount of time we invested into figuring out what this Fire beat was. Okay. Do you know what it ended up being? A Chance the Rapper Doritos commercial. It was the background music, like it was the jingle from that and I both was happy that we had finally figured it out, but the amount of time invested for it to be a Doritos commercial, I just like that might be an ugly road trip story.

Like I had a moment.

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[00:07:31] Nasreen: Oh man.

There's been things over the years, but they always become part of the plot line, so I guess it ends up being okay-ish sometimes. But there was a period of time when we were doing the Texas to New Hampshire thing where Everett was getting moody, a little over one.

Not communicative, hard to have him explain anything to anyone else, but like just would, just scream sometimes for fun, not in the car. When you took him out of the car to bring him and change him and things like that. Okay, now here's the issue. Usually I had my older son with me, and if anyone has road tripped through Texas with younger kids, you can't leave kids under 16 in the car by themselves.

You can get a ticket for it because of the heat. It's to avoid children being left in the car. So when I didn't have my older son with me, I'd have to bring everyone in because my girls weren't old enough to sit right outside with him and. One time just shrieked the entire way through the gas station.

We make it through the one in Texas. We're in Kentucky A day later . And he's screaming bloody murder so hard in the gas station and we're trying to deal with him. And you have to keep in mind my kids are blonde. Don't necessarily look like me. Someone called the cops. We made it out of there and we were leaving as they were pulling in and they looked at me and he's doing this and the sisters are there and we're fine.

And we got in the car and I think they just read the room and wandered off. But it was definitely in response to us. I saw someone pointing at us as they were coming out the door. So that was traumatic. And, puking on the side of the road in Colorado from altitude sickness myself.

But other than that,

It's all part of the plot.

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My husband at the time was driving the U-Haul and I had the chocolate lab in the backseat. Baby screaming the entire time. Chocolate lab vomiting in the back. 14 hours of hell. The entire trip. That was a horrible one. The other road trip from hell that comes fresh to mind is when my ex was driving and we ran out of gas.

He just didn't look. We were on a massive interstate. We were probably 15 miles from home and had to pull into the median side. I wanted to lose my everlasting mind. I was raised with a father who was a mechanic who said, you never let the gas get below a quarter of a tank. So I didn't understand this concept of you ran out. Like, how does that even happen? And after being in the car for eight hours, I was done. I was done. Yeah.

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[00:10:22] Desiree: Yeah.

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is still. And like of course at the time, she was still in school and she couldn't take the cat. And this cat hates all other cats. It's literally been like we have a portion of my house that this cat lives in and I'm so excited about finally getting rid of this cat that I'm willing to drive eight hours with a yowling all the way to Utah. Hopefully it won't be vomiting. 'cause the last time I drove to Utah was for a blogger conference and my son was vomiting the whole way. He got super car sick and it was like every single outfit that we had packed for him . Every hour we kept stopping and trash bags and, oh as a mom, I think every mom has had that one trip where there's a vomiting kid and it is just sheer misery

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[00:11:48] Maureen: I want to hear this 'cause I got one

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And literally a child is about to vomit and the thing just flings open. It has a really big opening, and you can dump them and rinse them out when you stop the next time. So you don't have a grocery bag hanging over their ears that there's a hole in that you didn't know about. It does happen occasionally, especially when you're in the car for that long.

So I will tell you that the rinsable bucket, not. A hard one that has to stay. Like one that can just be whipped out. You put a couple in different places. Amazing. Amazing. When vomit happens, which isn't amazing.

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for the beach too. They're sand

buckets that collapse

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planes and keeps those, but I have found the best are the big, huge zip locks. Keep those in there, they barf in them, and then you seal them up because you do not want that barf going. Anywhere and you can't always just pull over,

big Ziplocs also works for friends who've

maybe been overserved on the way home.

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[00:13:10] Maureen: Road trips are not always just with children.

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Amen.

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[00:13:17] Nasreen: We did a Thousand Miles of Awesome was our name for it with my friends. So it was myself, my husband, and then my best friend. And his best friend who are married to each other. They came down to Texas to visit us and we did an account loop that I was doing for work, but they came along for the ride essentially.

And we drove from up near College Station all the way down past Houston, through Victoria, down through like Harlingen, Macallan, Laredo, like along the border and it was a thousand miles and then back up through San Antonio and man, you gotta like someone to road trip with them. We all survived it and we did good.

And we were coming off of, myself and my friend, massive hangovers the day before. In retrospect, not a good idea. Do not get drunk the night before you leave on a massive road trip. It's a horrible idea.

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[00:14:11] Maureen: before any travel, essentially traveling, hungover is not ideal.

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[00:14:17] Maureen: traveling, while still tipsy. That's not bad.

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[00:14:46] Maureen: Like we skipped the good, I think or the bad.

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[00:14:49] Maureen: We had one trip where we were driving from Houston to Miami. All four kids, St. Bernard Jack Russell Chihuahua, and a 23 foot boat on the back. We made it to Baton Rouge. So about five hours into a 23 hour drive. We're going over the Mississippi River and basically the hub of the trailer broke. We had just gotten off the bridge, it could have been a very different, very ugly story if that had happened on the bridge. My husband pulls over and it's probably like eight, nine and, we call AAA and they're going to send somebody out. We wait and we wait on the side of the road, which is not ideal. The guy finally comes out like an hour and a half later and goes, oh yeah, we don't deal with trailers. We unhooked the trailer, leaving the boat on the side of the road in Baton Rouge, which is not ideal. We hope it's there tomorrow. And took the kids to a hotel, stayed the night. Found out that the manufacturer of the trailer, thankfully, is based in Baton Rouge, so that was. Just a miracle to be able to get that part. My husband got it the next day. We had it changed out and off we went to Miami. But yeah, the more stuff you take the more crazy things can happen. That's for sure.

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[00:16:09] Maureen: Yes. Oh, I was so lucky 'cause we would've had to wait days to get it shipped in.

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Just taking a breather. We both walked away, but the suburban was totaled and it was because the tires were bald and I just assumed he handled that stuff. I didn't even look and I should have. So checking tires, now I do that.

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You have the wrong tires and you have a driver who does not know how to drive in snow, I will rent you an Airbnb, a hotel, whatever, but you live in Flagstaff now until the roads are clear,

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[00:17:26] Maureen: Canadian. She should know this.

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[00:17:29] Maureen: Texas and Arizona too long now.

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And also downloading maps. You assume you're going to have great wifi every mile of your trip. And all of a sudden you have no signal left here, right here.

I don't know where I am. There are sites and apps you can use to download them in advance so that you don't need wifi to know where you're going. I'm still a printed out kind of gal, but bringing that.

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[00:18:03] Ciaran: even between here in Las Vegas there's dead Zones where there's no wifi, I've driven to Vegas several times and it's such a well traveled route between LA and Las Vegas. But there's dropout zones, so I'm like, oh, I need to get gas, or I need to stop for a snack and WiFi's down.

So it's really good to have that downloaded.

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[00:18:20] Maureen: and like you said about the gas thing, because there are. Parts of Louisiana, driving from Houston to New Orleans that it's a highway that is over the Bayou. You can't get off, there's nowhere to go. And trust me, everyone will hate you if you hold up that very long bridge or the causeway across anywhere.

And then, Alligator Alley in Florida. There's a lot of places where you need to look at your route and not assume. My son now drives regularly between Houston and Miami, and he's 20.

That's a long drive by yourself. And he's learned a lot about having, something like AAA and having that card and having that backup or making sure you know what your roadside assistance package is or number is. 'cause it never happens at a convenient, good time. It always happens at, you know, 11 o'clock at night in Baton Rouge.

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Those areas when there are accidents and they shut down for hours. If it's the middle of the summer, you want gas so you can run the AC sporadically so you need to be stopping or getting extra. The one thing that I carry in my car other than spare gas, if we're on a really long road trip is a fire extinguisher, which was never a thing that I carried in my car all the time, except for that we were in Louisiana. This is all going to be Louisiana Stories apparently. And we were on our way.

I know, right? We were back on our way back from Montgomery. My daughter and I, we had gone for a trip when she turned 10.

We're on our way back. And we're driving. It's moving, and all of a sudden there's a car accident in front of us. Two people hit each other and I. We are very lucky. The lady behind us moved and didn't hit us. I was able to turn, we did not get hit in any way, but we were right behind the cars that had hit each other. Wget out, make sure everyone is okay. We're in between exits in a fairly remote parish. I realized the guy's car is now smoking and I can see flames. I'm telling everyone to get out.

We're getting people out of the cars. It took almost 20 minutes for a firetruck to show up. By that point in time, his car was completely engulfed. It would not have been a total loss if any one of us had a fire extinguisher and been able to put it out immediately. Instead, the entire car went up. It felt so helpless to watch it happen.

Knowing that it was going to happen with no one being able to do anything. We all have fire extinguishers in our car now. I don't want to lose my car like that. I don't want to watch that again. It's just something I never thought of.

Exactly.

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[00:21:09] Ciaran: I am making notes for my road trip.I'm like all the things that I need to put in my car for this upcoming trip.

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Now, I think we're a little better prepared, but there were people who were stuck out on the roads. Overnight, freezing, their cars ran outta gas, trying to keep warm. And I just said, I don't ever want to be that person stuck. I'm going to have my hiking boots, I'm going to have an extra layer of warm. I'm going to have my protein bars. I'm going to have a jug of water.

But I didn't even think about a fire extinguisher. And that's a really good point.

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You can fix anything with a zip tie and duct tape. Always good to have with you. And just like all these Yeah, exactly like random things. I

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[00:22:26] Nasreen: understand how much stuff I had, anything that came up, I could deal with it, man. But quarters, emergency cash, like underneath.

Things in the car and hidden and just everything that you could possibly need. There's a lot. And I always clean it out before a road trip and position things near other people so I don't have to be handing things around the car . We'll bring it in for a checkup or get an oil change right before that comes with the multi-point inspection.

When you were saying the thing about the tires obviously important, but also fluids. You don't think about it. So having lived in Texas. Also, having lived in the Northeast, I realized something that I had forgotten. Things freeze. The windshield wiper fluid in Texas is different from the windshield wiper fluid that's designed for freezing weather.

And it will freeze when you spray it on your windshield if it's really cold out.

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you're supposed to have all kinds of things for a winter kit. And then same thing for the ridiculous heat in the south in the summer. If you don't have air conditioning and water, you're not going to last very

long out there.

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I'll have to go look in the

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[00:23:45] Desiree: it's yellow.

You spray it on the windshield and it thaws everything right away.

It does, but not just that. It has stayed on. I've been parking my car in the garage for five years now, but that layer of sheen has stayed on the windshield so that when I'm driving, the rain just pellets off just off the side.

You don't even have to use your windshield wipers. I love that because sometimes the windshield wipers are annoying. It's not raining hard enough to really go full throttle, but it's enough that it's bothering you. But you put that ice thing on there and it just right off.

It's a beautiful thing.

It's just, I just could see the beads, the beads of water, just leave the windshield, which is a beautiful thing.

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think like you just do those

Even thinking about it. But yeah, then you can just spray it and you're not trying to chisel out your

windshield wipers

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But one other thing I recently added to my kit. My MacGyver kit in the car is Dollar Tree Sells these white marker pen things that you can write with. On the windows. So if you had to leave your car or something, you could write like tow truck coming or went to, you could leave a note on it or your information or just write some direction.

'cause a lot of times now when people leave the car 'cause they have to go to another exit or they have to do something, it helps. So I put one of those in each of our cars. Dollar 25

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[00:25:48] Desiree: Mo you have to have the,

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[00:25:51] Nasreen: I.

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[00:25:57] Maureen: and then they're like, Hey, your car's on the side of the road. You're like,

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[00:26:07] Maureen: They put

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[00:26:08] Maureen: on. Yeah buy. Do you know people are doing that? Just Hey, she's getting married, and you're like, no, she's not. She want to pay for drinks

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[00:26:20] Nasreen: But it's a horrible idea in general. My main goal when I'm on these long distance road trips is not having the car broken into while I'm on it. Okay. That is a bad on a road trip. Even if we're traveling cross country for extended periods of time, the minivan, we're not.

Putting things up high. I'm not stringing those things across my car that my kid pulls something off every time we go into a new state. I'm not riding Disney bound. I don't want everyone to know we're out of our element and might have fun stuff in our car. Like that stuff drives me crazy. I look at that and I'm like, you decorated your car for your kids, for your road trip, and now everyone knows that you are traveling.

You might have stuff in there. You probably brought the kids electronics. No.

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Gone. Probably gone to Mexico, gone on a container, gone, stripped, gone. So a couple things. If you have a vehicle that is likely to be stolen get a key scrambler. We learned this from a friend who was driving their kid to college. Everything this kid owns is packed in the back of an F250. They stop at a gas station, they all go in for the group pee break, synchronizing, bladders, getting snacks, come back out, truck's gone. Truck's gone. Everything he needs for college gone. Like you think of how much stuff

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[00:28:03] Maureen: is closed, his like, everything you had bought for the kid gone. So they got another F250 and they got a key scrambler.

But, we had an air tag show up in the truck. We valeted it Friday, it showed up Saturday. We just figured it was like a kid head or something, we were going somewhere and didn't really pay attention to it, and then Sunday it was gone.

Yeah.

We have air tags on all of our car keys, and we have an air tag in two of our cars that our children drive. But that was my truck

and I always know where it is, . I figured nobody would steal it without the keys. So

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[00:28:50] Desiree: I am the opposite.

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that, but then I'll end up on the side of the road with no gas.

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[00:29:00] Maureen: Of course

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[00:29:03] Maureen: I don't like to let it go below half. It's

just stressful.

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[00:29:07] Desiree: Any other must springs? Any other must things.

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trips?

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[00:29:31] Maureen: Oh really?

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It was always a treat for a road trip. I just bring my own snacks now. I'm a protein bar girl, y'all know that.

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You get candy like once a trip. Not every time we go into the gas station . That bag of candy means it's a road trip, not just an average day.

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[00:30:41] Maureen: We've had to be more Buccee's efficient.

You guys know what you want. Let's get in, let's get out. 'cause we can. Easily spend an hour and $150 at Buccee's,

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[00:30:52] Ciaran: We stop at Costco for gas. And

for snacks. We know I'm going to find a snack. I can eat 'cause I'm gluten free also. But it is hard.

You have to be like, okay, no, we're not going to look like what different snacks they have at this Costco. And check out oh, isn't that a cool blanket that's not happening. Control

yourself.

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[00:31:17] Maureen: Talk to people who do that road trip a lot. 'cause there's usually some little gems in there. We found this meat market in Louisiana that now we have to stop and get Tur, duckin and budin that like, I don't even know, I didn't even know these words when I moved here.

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[00:31:31] Maureen: Boudan, there you go. But you gotta get the whole Louisiana accent going. But I will say I will give Subway Canada credit. They do have a gluten-free bread . And every time I go into an American one I'm like, why can't you just give me some bread? it makes it so much easier if one

stop, like Subway is consistent enough along a highway

that you could actually stop and eat something.

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They like keep me awake. I like their

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[00:32:25] Nasreen: so yeah.

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[00:32:27] Nasreen: Yep,

exactly. Lot of work. Lot of attention paying.

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[00:32:38] Nasreen: Oh my goodness. I think we covered a lot on road trips and I'm sure we could do an entire nother one on road trips 'cause they're such a hot topic.

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trip to a middle spot.

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[00:32:53] Ciaran: In our emergency kit.

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[00:32:56] Maureen: wine.

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[00:32:58] Desiree: We'll have a time to talk Travel Road Trip, meetup somewhere, and we can invite all the listeners too.

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[00:33:04] Desiree: Yes.

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[00:33:17] Narrator: This has been another episode of Time to Talk Travel, brought to you by HashtagTravels. com. You can keep in touch with us between episodes by checking out our site, joining our newsletter, or connecting with us on social. We've always got the information you need in our episode notes. Until next time, happy travels, and thanks for being a part of our trip.