Driving 4,000 miles through the hottest, windiest, and dustiest parts of Texas, Arizona, and California in a car with the engine power of a really expensive electric bicycle, while managing a gushing perimenopausal period, accompanied only by a reactive dog named Dracula, doesn’t sound like it would be anyone’s best trip, but it was mine.
I have been on many road trips in my life, most of which were planned around some age-appropriate, seemingly life-changing and specific-to-me-hilarious dramatic need for a change in home address. There was the time in my 20s when my best friend helped me load up my red Mitsubishi Mirage to move from California to Illinois after the girlfriend whom I was living with cheated on me with a man named Dino, a betrayal I first attempted to heal from by attending a rave at the Orange Country Fairgrounds, where I did every drug handed to me while drinking discarded bottles of water from the ground and unkowingly peeing my pants. As Romeo said, “O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick.”
