How was your summer family road trip? Kind of rough!
How was your rolling hostage situation? Easy peasy!
When you're traveling by car, train, subway and hoof with a spouse and one or more children—for instance, to Montreal, New York, Washington and Niagara Falls—it can be difficult to consistently communicate open-mindedness, flexibility and good natured consideration of everyone's physical needs and psychological desires.
Or, let me put it another way: When you're trying to lay down some miles so you can actually see some of the sites you did all this planning, spent all this money and came all this way to see, you need people to occasionally hold their bladders, suffer a moment's peckshiness, put the wee toe blister into perspective, shut the motherfuck up and listen close while I read the goddamn fucking Gettysburg Address, at the proper cadence and with necessary parenthetical oral annotation, off the Lincoln Memorial wall.
But we're a healthy family. You know how I know? My people got better at going along with me—and I became less Great Santini-esque and Clark Griswold-ish—as the trip went along.
So that the trip became so unlike a hostage situation, that it almost felt, at times, like a vacation. Almost.
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