Advent Memories Day 10 : Road Trip!

My first 15 Christmases included Road Trips. All the way from Columbia, Mo to Dallas. I think it originally took us about 12 hours to do this drive, but over the years as us kids got older and roads improved, I think the fam cut it to about 10 (and I think I personally could do it in 9 when I got to college and did it on my own). I have several memories of these long drives in the car. Unfortunately, many of them are not so great! I don't think they negatively effected me too much though.
-- Fighting over backseat space with my sister. My parents solved this little issue when I was 9 by purchasing a vehicle with a 3rd seat.

-- Throwing up. I used to get very car sick and would throw up at least once every trip. I'm not sure when I finally outgrew this (although, I still get car sick in NYC taxis).

-- Games. We had car bingo and we always played the ABC billboard sign game. I think we knew exactly where every Q and every Z was along the route.

-- Being carried to the car at the crack o' dawn in my PJs. In my youngest years, we'd leave super early and mom and dad didn't bother to wake me up. Guess they thought they could get a few hours of driving in silence out of it.

-- Rolling into Dallas after sunset. When I was really little, I didn't know where we were most of the way through Missouri and Oklahoma, but I knew when we were driving into to Dallas. The roads would be bigger and the lights would shine brighter. I also had a sign that we were almost to my grandparent's house...the piano store on Central Expressway. I think it went out of business in recent years (it was still there for at least part of the time I lived in Dallas post-college). It was a really big piano store with huge windows so you could see all kinds of grand pianos. As soon as I saw that, I knew Grammy's house was just around the bend.