Kansas (April A2Z ~ Misty Memories)

Somewhere in California, age 16

Welcome to my April A2Z posts! This time, I am officially signed up on the challenge sheet and will be visiting other bloggers on the list. My theme is "misty memories," which will include a bunch of rambling about old stuff in my life, and hopefully some of it will be accurate, but if not, there's no one around to contradict me. Today we continue with K for Kansas.

My parents usually planned a two-week vacation every summer, and we often took a road trip. Some years we went to Ohio to visit my mother's family, but that wasn't much fun for my father since it was very small-town and rural. I liked going there because there were animals, but Dad was a city guy, and he liked to see new things and try new restaurants. There were also the issues of politics and prejudices and stuff, which I was oblivious to at the time. Now, of course, that all might bother me too. Even so, it was my mother's family, and since we saw his way more frequently, you would think he could just deal with it and not moan about how boring and terrible it all was, right?

One year, the summer I was 16 and deeply OCD, we flew to San Diego, drove up to Los Angeles, and then took a bus to San Francisco, which was admittedly a bit scary at times on the winding coast road, and my mom had massive anxiety over it. That was an ambitious vacation, and my parents argued the whole time. In my view, they fought about the dumbest things, such as how to take a photo, where to take it, how to set the camera, etc. I don't even know why my mother got involved in these disagreements, since my dad had actually been a professional photographer and still had a darkroom set up in our house for when he had time to develop pictures himself. They fought about a million other things too, and I was busy trying to figure out how little I could eat without drawing attention to myself. Anyway, we flew back from SF three days earlier than planned because everyone was so miserable.

The next year, they decided to return to the road trip format. Again, this was very involved. First, we drove down from the suburbs of Chicago to St. Louis to see the Arch. My dad thought it was way cool, but I was unimpressed. Next, the plan was to drive across Missouri and straight through Kansas to Colorado, except my mom dozed off, and my dad quit paying attention to the signs, or something, so we forked north toward Nebraska. Mom woke up and freaked out because things were not staying on schedule! My dad managed to correct course, but we were late to check into our motel, and naturally there had to be a big yell-a-thon over it. At some point, I bought several romance novels at a gift shop to read in the backseat so I could distract myself from their sniping. It was a good plan, except for the motion sickness.

Colorado was fun; we did all the usual things and bought some turquoise jewelry. Then we had to drive northeast to go see the rock faces. Again, I read until I barfed, and my parents bickered over whatever they could find to disagree about. Anything would suffice. We saw Mount Rushmore, big whoop, and finally drove through Iowa to get back home. That was a lot!

People wonder why I don't enjoy traveling like apparently everyone else on the planet does, and we can refer back to this post whenever someone needs an explanation. Besides having to deal with random migraines and disliking changes to routine, I am still traumatized from this Summertime Fight Club. (Not that they didn't argue during the rest of the year, but at least I wasn't trapped in a car with the screaming.) There were a lot of good things about my parents, and I know that overall I had an easier childhood than many, but this? This was bad.