All of our belongings were packed and our moving truck was loaded (if you missed that story, see last week’s edition ‘Packing and Preparations’). We had maps, driving directions, walkie talkies to communicate between the moving truck and the car1, and enough car snacks to feed a small army (or just me).
As the distance required to stop the 16 foot moving truck probably exceeded the distance that I could reliably see (Is that my lawn lady wearing a snorkel? Is that Dustin Hoffman in the car next to me?) we decided that Fred should probably drive the truck. He requested to ride with the dog so that left me to drive the Nissan Sentra with our cats- One-eye Willi (you goonie!) and Animal (named after Animal from the Muppets because she often screams randomly and incoherently). I anticipated that Animal’s screaming might become a problem on the 40+ hour journey so I went to the veterinarian’s office and procured some sedatives. I was warned that I should give each cat ¼ pill and then wait for 60 full minutes before giving an additional ¼ pill if necessary. The doctor also cautioned me to not give more than ½ pill in any 24 hour period (so many rules…).
The morning of our departure we wrapped ¼ of a tranquilizer pill in cheddar cheese for each of the cats, assuming they’d eat the cheese and unknowingly
You can see the resemblance right?
consume the tranquilizers as well. My cat took one sniff of the little cheese goblin and suddenly became Ashley Judd from Kiss the Girls2. I tried presenting the cheese from different attractive angles and using catch phrases that I learned while watching too many infomercials during my insomniac phase at URI3: “Eat your first cheese goblin and we’ll include this second cheese goblin, completely poison free!”. After 5 minutes we ended up having to pry open their mouths and drop the pink pills down their throats anyway.
We started our journey east at 8am on Wednesday morning. At 8:05am one of the cats peed in the car litterbox. Apparently she couldn’t read the sign that I posted on the side of the box- “Emergency use only”. The smell of ammonia wafting through the vehicle was overpowering. I turned on the radio to distract myself from the unpleasantness of the smell. I started singing along… and so did the cats. 40 minutes later I had either gotten used to the ammonia smell or it was neutralized by the 20 pounds of baking soda cat litter that I had put in the box for just that purpose. Animal was still also singing along.
About 2 hours into the trip the CD player in my 14 year old car broke (what are the odds?). I tried with the radio for a little while but when the only station I could tune into was playing Rush Limbaugh I switched to my IPod Shuffle. I plugged one of my ears with an earbud (I left the other one out for safety and so I could hear if the Cap’n called me on the walkie). I started singing along with the music on my shuffle and abruptly realized that- I cannot sing. My left ear could hear the notes that I should have been singing and my right ear could hear the squawking coming from my mouth. I decided that this was an opportunity and a challenge. I would use the remainder of the drive as one long 2400 mile voice lesson. With enough hard work I would eventually learn to harmonize with the voice in my headphones. I’d get out of the car in New Hampshire with a fantastic singing voice and the lead in a broadway musical. After 5 songs I gave up trying. My version of Hollaback Girl would make anyone listening to it go B-A-N-A-N-A-S , my attempt at Heart of Glass would literally break a heart of glass… or at least some eardrums, and I just didn’t feel that I authentically liked big butts as much as MC Hammer.
By the next gas stop I had used up all of the auditory goodness contained on my Shuffle so we opened up the back of the moving truck and resurrected a Discman from it’s technological grave4. Since I was now able to listen to CDs again and since I still had miles to practice for my starring role as Sophie in Mamma Mia I decided to listen to the audio book that I had brought with me. I put on the first disc and the oddest thing happened… there was silence in my right ear. The cat had finally stopped yowling. Could her yowling have been in response to my attempts at singing (shrieking ) in the front seat? Nah…. I gave her the whole ½ tranquilizer on each of the following days to keep her quiet just in case 😉
We ended day 1 somewhere in Eastern North Dakota around 9pm. I’ll give you the shortened version of the following days, because honestly- how much interesting stuff could happen inside the contained environment of a Nissan Sentra… it was kind of like Bio-Dome in there but without Pauly Shore or that Baldwin (but which one was it?).
Day 2- North Dakota to Wisconsin.
A housefly decided that it was going to get the heck out of Valley City, North Dakota. Maybe he was attracted to the cat-box smell (which had burned my nasal passages so completely that I was now immune to it’s odor) or maybe he owed a fly bookie money and needed to skip town… who knows. Regardless of the reasons he did it, he chose to get into my car that morning. He decided to sit on the floor right by my feet, no- on my feet, no- on my leg, no- on my feet, no- on my knee, now back to my feet. He would take intermittent breaks from flying around and annoying the crap out of me so I only had to dangerously swerve around the road every 15-20 minutes. I started looking for hitchhikers- specifically Ralph Macchio wearing his Karate Kid outfit and wielding a pair of chopsticks or at least a little old lady that looked like she could swallow a fly, a spider, a cat, and a horse. I found neither and thus had no relief. The fly plagued me all the way to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin where he finally flew out the window and is undoubtedly living out the rest of his life under a new fly-dentity.
Day 3- Wisconsin to Ohio
We thought it would be best to drive around the Milwaukee/Chicago area in the middle of the night to avoid delays in the construction zones and heavily traveled
areas. We forgot one, well two, small details5 whose oversight led me into the seventh circle of hell. Animal nominated herself night navigator and ‘helped’ me drive like an overly-concerned spouse or parent might (did you see that deer? did you know the speed limit is only 55? these are not the droids you’re looking for… ) from her perch on the cooler in the passenger seat. By 3am I was at the edge of my sanity while I guzzled a berry flavored juicy-juice box (I don’t drink coffee), worked on my Moves like Jagger, and maneuvered the speeding Sentra along the dimly lit city highways. Sometime around 4:00am I called the Cap’n on the walkie, practically in tears and threatening to pay the next toll by cat (I think she’s worth at least the cost of road usage from Waukegan to 75th Street). He mercifully stopped our caravan and recovered for me a can of compressed air6, which is the only thing that seems to scare Animal. Back in the car- a couple of yowls and a couple of air blasts later Animal and I finally understood one another. There was blissful silence as we happily rolled through Indiana and into Ohio7.
Day 4- Ohio to New York
We were traveling through the Northwest corner of Pennsylvania around noon and the local radio station started playing Whitney Houston’s version of the Star Spangled Banner. I love a patriotic tune8 and wanted to share my enthusiasm. I pressed the button down on the walkie talkie to let my husband in on what was sure to be the worst concert of the century. As I finished up “… and the home of the BRAaaaAAaaaAVE!”
The truly Brave ones..
I released the button so I could hear the thunderous applause from the moving truck. Nothing… not even a “Let’s play ball!”. A minute later my gagging husband beeped in to tell me that my singing had caused some distress in the moving truck. When he held the speaker up so the dog could hear me, the dog responded by jumping up and smashing himself as far from the sound as he possibly could. Being unable to get further away from what he probably thought was a pack of marauding baboons, he panicked and expressed his anal gland. We stopped shortly after to put a fresh cover on the dog bed and I stopped singing for the rest of the day.
Day 5- New York to New Hampshire
The drive was starting to get long (as is this post), we were exhausted but we pushed on, knowing this was the last day before we could ‘live free or die’. I had listened to most of my CDs, Fred got suckered into buying a delicious concoction dubbed “maple cream” from a man at a rest stop for $10 (the man had the decency to present his wares on a table instead of just flashing them like replica watches from the inside of a trench coat but the whole thing definitely seemed a bit back alley if you ask me), entertainment was growing thin, and the grapes that I bought for the trip were getting a little soft. Consequently, I present the results of my study:
Activity of bad grapes dropped from the window of a car moving approximately 70mph onto asphalt road. Results are averages with a standard deviation of +/- 1 bad grape:
Things were getting desperate.
Thankfully we arrived at our final destination- Nottingham, New Hampshire- shortly after I ran out of bad grapes. We unloaded only our mattress from the moving truck and settled in for a good night’s sleep… all of us except for Remmie, who was still keeping watch for those marauding baboons. -Piggy Out-
Up Next Week- Where we live.
1-Because on a test run both using our headlights to signal Morse code and trying to communicate by throwing out gang signs from car to car while rolling down the highway at 70mph were epic fails. The radios seemed to work much better. I was code name ‘Miss Piggy’- assigned for my over-consumption of car snacks on road trips, my love of the Muppets, and because I liked to say “Piggy Out” instead of “Over and Out” when I ended my transmissions. Fred was code name ‘Cap’n Crunch’- assigned for his affinity for the delicious sugar cereal, his enjoyment of the phrase “AAAAarrrrr” to end transmissions, and because if you picture Fred with a huge white mustache and that goofy Captain’s hat it just makes sense, right?
2- Willi and Ashley share that same little button nose that can reliably sniff out poison poorly disguised with yellow cheddar but I guess that’s where the similarities end. Willi didn’t kick my butt, escape through the woods and go on a crime-solving spree with Morgan Freeman… which is unfortunate because that would have made a really interesting blog post.
3- Not to be confused with my other insomnia phases, each differentiated by poor post-prime-time programming… after URI insomnia phase (trading spaces reruns), MSU insomnia phase (Montana Ag Live- the episodes with Roy were my favorite), and my current insomnia phase (I’ve taken to just staring at the ceiling these days since we don’t have cable. I don’t get to sleep any faster but it’s much less mentally disturbing than that guy on speed selling the ShamWow… SHAM-WOW!).
4- I’m not sure why this didn’t make it into the useless items pile before we moved (welcome to the 90’s) but boy was I glad to have it now!
5- 1)We neglected to tranquilize the cat when we woke up at 1am to get in the car 2)Cats are nocturnal
6- You know the kind that you clean your computer keyboard out with… and if you aren’t cleaning your computer keyboard regularly you should totally flip that thing over and at least give it a shake even if you don’t have the time to spray it out and disinfect it properly. There’s probably enough crumbs in there to sustain the entire lab rat population from the Secret of Nimh.
7- The universal disappointment that I felt with Ohio is another story that I could fill an entire posting with… and I probably will come election year, as that is the only other time anyone need give any thought to Ohio.
8- Especially that song “My daddy served in the army, he lost his right eye, but he flew a flag out in our yard until the day that he died!”. My daddy still has his right eye and we never did have a flag in our yard but that song always makes me swell with pride and leaves me with an overwhelming desire to have a waving American flag tattooed on my upper right arm… maybe I am going to fit in with the people of New Hampshire.
The Side Show 
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