Remember a Thanksgiving Road Trip

As I said in my previous post, Thanksgiving always meant a road trip to my grandpa and grandma’s house in PA.  Back then, road trips did not involve electronics as they do today.  Nope, we had to entertain ourselves from Michigan to Pennsylvania and back home again.  My sister and I would sit in the back seat and get along perfectly.  Um, well, okay, we did do some of the “she’s touching me” type of stuff, but the trips weren’t that bad.  At least, I don’t think they were.  I’m sure my Dad might have a little different take on it. lol!

We would play various games and read while we traveled along.  (Special games just for long road trips are always a good idea.)  We pretty much always stopped to eat at Wendy’s.  You see, my Dad likes Wendy’s, and it was a good place to stop for us.  In later years, our first stop would be Wendy’s and our second stop would be at a sit-down restaurant.  When we were younger, we did mainly fast food on a road trip.  (Having set stopping points gave us something to look forward to on the trip.)

One year, as the story is told, we were heading through Ohio.  (Note: Munchkin loves this story and gets a big kick out of it, but I’m not sure it will completely translate onto the blog because you almost need to hear it for full effect.)  I wanted to ask my Dad something about Ohio (those exact details are now a little sketchy), but for some reason, I couldn’t say Ohio.  I kept saying Ohoho.  I have no idea why I couldn’t get it out.  Of course, this verbal difficulty leads to lots of giggling which only makes the matter worse.  I never was able to spit out Ohio on that part of our journey, but it certainly made for a fun story later.

When traveling to PA in November, you never knew if it would be sunny, rainy, snowy, or some mix of those things.  It was always an adventure while we traveled.  Sometimes our trip would take much longer than others.  On those longer trips, we would need to amuse ourselves a bit more.  There was always the classic trying to get the truckers to honk move.  (Why that is so much fun I will never know, yet it is.)  We would sing silly songs, place eye spy, and try to find various license plates from many different states.  (A book of road trip games helps for times like these.)

Once we hit the 7 mountains (this is just what we called them), we knew that we were getting closer to our grandparent’s house.  We would climb higher up into the mountains and our ears would pop.  Up and down the hilly roads we would travel.  The closer we got to grandma and grandpa’s house, the faster Dad seemed to drive.  He was motivated to finally get home.  Maybe it had something to do with the “are we there yet?” comments coming from the back seat?  Finally, we would arrive at the house.  Lots of hugs would be shared.

On the way home, grandma would always load us up with tasty goodies including Amish whoopie pies.  Yum!  (Having special treats for the road always seemed to make the trip go much smoother.)  While I may not have always enjoyed those road trips growing up, I do look back at them with many fond memories as well as a few that I’d just assume forget.  (Um, getting sick while traveling is not fun.  Just sayin’.)  I’m grateful that we had the tradition of heading to my grandparents’ house every year.

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