Road Trip Simulator

When I was 15, I took Driver’s Ed from a curmudgeonly teacher who looked like Tom T. Hall. He wore polyester pants (mostly in grays and blues), short sleeve dress shirts and a persistent look of disdain. He never said much. He simply corrected our driving mistakes through a series of grunts and sighs. I remember only one thing he said with any detail. We were learning to merge onto the highway and my friend was driving and I was in the back seat. As she drove down the on-ramp, she looked over her left shoulder to see if there was oncoming traffic. Her gaze must have lingered because he snapped, “What are you doing? You watching the Waltons back there?”  When we weren’t tooling around the streets of Kansas City, we were crammed in a dank room in the basement of the high school sitting in front of faux car consoles practicing our moves. The instructor would show a film of a city street and we were supposed to pretend to drive and turn quickly to avoid hazards that would pop up. I thought of those simulators when I shot the following video last weekend. 

We were driving to a soccer tournament in Woodbury which is about a 30 minute drive from our house. The kids noticed a cloud (visible in the right top of the video screen) and…well…you’ll have to watch it for yourself. Watching this video will give you a small taste of what it is like to take a road trip with us. Feel free to send sympathy cards via e-mail or to send money to us for ear plugs.