Road trip: Bored in the back seat
Some trips are not always for fun.
Visiting sick relatives, moving and work can reveal the darker side of travel. But it’s that road trip with coworkers that can truly test your mettle.
So, what do you do, stuck in the back seat of a Toyota Camry for four hours as the front passengers have their conversation in a foreign language?
Use the time wisely, I thought, as the trip began. I’ll work on a project that is due next week, get ahead of the game, I thought. Unfortunately, I’m a PC and so is my laptop, which has the battery life of gnat, I could only compute for about an hour. Ah, now what?
Holiday cards. Yes, I can write those out and address them. Sure, that’s fun. Of course, 30 minutes later, I’m done. Now, what?
Gotta’ use my imagination.
The front passenger is asleep now and the driver is doing his thing, seeing how many times he can weave out of the slow lane and drive one mile under the speed limit through Ohio. Must fend off carsickness and visions of us slamming into the side of a semi truck.
Trying to entertain yourself in the backseat of a car with your coworkers in the front is a difficult task. Volume seems to take on extremes. Either you hear the road click, click, clicking by or one person is shouting into their cell phone during a conference call.
Thank God for my iPhone. I posted a few things on Facebook, texted a little and sent e-mails to friends asking for help if I died on this trip. But, since we are driving in a car that seems to have only one cigarette lighter plug and that’s being utilized for the Garmin (telling us we need to go south for 250 miles on Interstate 75) I’ve got to save the battery. Rural areas chew up batteries.
So, I settle down and look out the window. Ohio has a lot of farms. I can count them. I can count barns (with and without roofs). Wow, I can count cops parked in the center of the highway; one, two, freeze. I can count how many times the same truck passes us. I can count how many times I wonder why we’re not using cruise control. I can count how many ways I’m a better driver than this guy. I can… oh, I better try to sleep.
Sleeping is always the best default way to kill time when you’re stuck somewhere you don’t want to be (and 
believe me, no adult wants to be stuck in the backseat). But the problem is, I had a good night’s rest and the backseat is made for carseats, not a humans. This is possibly the most uncomfortable place to sit for four plus hours, and it makes you crazy knowing that you have to sit here for another four on the way back.
What to do? I marvel at the amount of road construction on the highway. It’s December and we’re north of the Mason Dixon Line. Don’t the road crews head south in the winter anymore? You have to wonder about the safety of drivers when the highway is covered in ice, snow and orange barrels. Your stimulus dollars hard at work. Right, I can count only one active road crew in 100 miles of construction during this trip.
Getting snide in the back seat is probably not a good idea, considering we’re not even to our destination. I decide, I need to go back to counting things. Churches? It’s Ohio, you can click off steeples every 30 
seconds. And then there’s the motherload: Exit 29, just north of Cincinnati, on the east side of the highway. A huge Jesus, sinking into or springing out of a lake. His arms are stretched upward, so as not to get his sleeves wet. I wonder (for the next 40 miles) how the people of that church appreciate all the tithing spent to make that sinking Jesus.
The ride home is easier. I’ve still got battery juice in my phone so I post a little more to Facebook, send a few e-mails and am able to text ETAs and whining of the trip to home. Now, I settle down, listen to some music and drift in and out of sleep. It’s not much, but that’s about all I can do without being in the driver’s seat.
Most of all, I know what to expect. No matter what the trip, you’ve got to enjoy the ride.
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