1990s Road Trip Stories — Motoring Lane

The summer of 1997 was the summer Gary Pemberton discovered MapQuest. He printed the directions to Gatlinburg, Tennessee from Columbus, Ohio on a Tuesday night, all seventeen pages of them, and hole-punched them into a binder he labeled 'TRIP COMMAND CENTER' in black marker. His wife Linda watched him do this from the kitchen doorway and said nothing, which Gary interpreted as approval. Their three kids — Tyler (13), Kayla (11), and Brendan (8) — were told to pack light. Tyler brought a duffel bag, a Discman, and forty-two CDs. Kayla brought a duffel bag, her diary, and a pillow shaped like a cat. Brendan brought a Game Boy, one game cartridge, and what turned out to be only one working AA battery.

The 1997 Dodge Grand Caravan was burgundy with gray interior and had a cassette deck that only played tapes if you held the eject button down at a precise forty-degree angle, a technique Gary had mastered over three years of ownership. It also had a rear air conditioning vent that blew exclusively on Brendan's left knee, which he complained about for the first two hours until Linda gave him her cardigan to drape over it. Tyler had his headphones on before they cleared the Columbus city limits. Kayla was already writing in her diary. Gary had the Trip Command Center binder open on the center console.

The first MapQuest crisis hit outside Cincinnati when Page 4 instructed Gary to 'turn left on Connector Road' — a road that, as best anyone could determine, did not exist. Gary drove slowly past three intersections, binder in his lap, while Linda read the directions aloud and Tyler said from the back seat, without removing his headphones, 'We should've just asked someone.' Gary said they did not need to ask someone. They drove an extra fourteen miles before a gas station attendant in Erlanger, Kentucky set them right. Gary updated the binder with a red pen.

Brendan's Game Boy battery died at the Tennessee border. The silence that followed lasted approximately four seconds before he began a campaign of 'I'm bored' that Linda later described as 'relentless, creative, and honestly impressive in its stamina.' He counted yellow cars. He invented a game where he assigned point values to different types of trucks. He asked Gary forty-one questions about how engines work, which Gary answered patiently for the first thirty and then began making up answers for the remainder. Brendan did not notice. He was genuinely fascinated to learn that the carburetor was 'basically a tiny kitchen.'

They arrived in Gatlinburg at 6:30 PM, two hours behind schedule, and checked into a cabin that smelled like pine and old carpet in the best possible way. Tyler took one look at the mountains and put his Discman away. Kayla wrote three pages in her diary before dinner. Brendan found a creek behind the cabin and spent forty-five minutes trying to catch a crawdad with his bare hands, which he eventually did, held up triumphantly, and then immediately dropped. Gary stood on the porch with a beer and said, 'This is exactly what I planned.' Linda said, 'You got lost in Kentucky.' Gary said, 'Strategically.'

The drive home was quieter. Brendan slept across the back row with his head on Kayla's cat pillow. Tyler shared one earbud with Kayla somewhere around Lexington, which was the nicest thing he'd done for his sister in two years. Gary drove the whole way without consulting the binder once. Linda held it in her lap, just in case. The Grand Caravan made it back to Columbus without incident, the cassette deck playing a Hootie and the Blowfish tape at the precise forty-degree angle all the way up I-71.