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WRITTEN BY GRACE THEISEN
It’s spring break travel time! Sadly, the Theisens are stuck at home this year. However, we still recall some memorable past road trips. There is nothing like piling seven family members into one car!
Last year, we drove to Alabama—think 22 driving hours with my four brothers. The trip started out pretty well. We played car games like “How long until the next big city?” and “When will the snow cover end?” Most importantly, we didn’t argue much.
Oddly, as we drove farther south, the conditions worsened—heavy snowfall and very icy roads. By Springfield, Illinois, we had seen 107 cars in the ditch, including a semi (and we’d begun playing “count the cars in the ditch”). With no snowplows in sight, we found a hotel for the night. We weren’t risking being ditched-car number 108.
Once we got past the Illinois blizzard, the ride went smoothly again. We stopped for lunch in Memphis for some traditional Southern cooking. We picked Gus’s, a famous soul food restaurant—for my younger brother, Gus, and my youngest half-African-American brother, Quinn. We ordered a ton of food, but then realized that they’d cooked everything in peanut oil. Quinn is allergic to peanuts. So, we’d taken him to get some cultural food, and all he got was coleslaw. (We hid the rest of the food from him—poor guy.)
When we finally pulled into the driveway of our beach destination, I started freaking out. I jumped out of the car and felt the cold sand on my feet. It was high tide, and the waves were crashing under our stilted house. It was truly amazing.
The next morning, I awoke to my younger brothers yelling about the dolphins they saw from our house. Although the weather was not perfect, we didn’t care—we Wisconsinites would rather have 65 degrees over -10 any day. Alabamans were bundled up, wearing pants and sweatshirts, complaining about the weather. We ran right past them and went swimming in the ocean.
