The other day, no one asked me, "John, what are some good things to know about when taking a road trip with you?" Well I'm glad no one asked me because now I have a column that I can share with my wonderful reader. Here's just a few of the things that you might experience if you take a road trip with me:

Car Chases May Ensue

Trevor and I had taken a road trip to Tennessee. Many snippets of this trip have been sprinkled throughout various columns but I don't think this one has. If so, then I truly have run out of things to write about and I'm the most boring human being on the planet. One night we were driving around with Karen and Sharon, two people that I used to know when I lived up there. Yes, you can go ahead and take a break to laugh at the fact that we were hanging out with the amazing rhyming name duo. As we're driving, this other car with a couple of girls pulls up, honks and then waves at us. I wave back and they speed ahead.

I turned to Trevor at this point and said, "I think I must have used to know those people, let's follow them!" I pulled up behind them and they turned a couple of streets. We went ahead and followed. Then they turned into the parking lot of an old abandoned Wal-Mart and went around back of the building. I thought it was kind of weird, but still followed. We went around the Wal-Mart a few times and I finally decided that they probably weren't someone that I knew but we were having fun with the little car chase so I would follow it through. We stopped on one side of the Wal-Mart and waited for them. They took the bait and sped down the road next to it.

I should take a moment now and define the term 'sped' that I used earlier. I was driving a 10-year old Plymouth Horizon and the people were chasing were driving an old Nissan Sentra. So sped is a term that really doesn't apply. In fact, let me re-write that last sentence. They took the bait and limped down the road next to it. We followed them into an apartment complex and basically cornered them into the back of the parking lot. We parked and Trevor and I rushed up to the door. They were frantically rolling up their windows to prevent the psychos that had been chasing them for the past fifteen minutes from getting into their car. We stopped them and explained that we thought they were someone I knew. They said they were just trying to be friendly. I guess we showed them what friendly gets you.


Coffee is Evil

"Trevor, is your friend alright?" said Esmerelda as we stopped for the fifth time that hour. She was referring to me.

We had taken a road trip up to Montana and on the way back picked up a girl from Baker who needed a ride back to school in Oklahoma. No, it wasn't some random girl, that might have had dire consequences. It was a friend of Trevor's family in Montana. Before we started our trip back, we stopped at Trevor's family's house for some breakfast. They asked if I wanted coffee and I accepted. The thing that I didn't realize was that coffee is bad and does bad bad things to me.

We started out on the trip and everything was ok for a little while. Then maybe 30 minutes to an hour later I had to stop to go to the bathroom. Then every 20 or so minutes after that. It was a little while later when I stopped on the side of the road and spend five minutes urinating on a tree that Esmerelda asked if I was alright. Luckily it was only a couple more stops and the coffee had run it's course. Though not before I was threatened with having to sleep in the bath tub that night. So a word to the wise, don't let me drink coffee and drive.


Fires May Ensue

This isn't really a road trip story, but it is a car story so I think it applies. I was driving my son home from a soccer game. It had gotten a little chilly out at this time of year so I turned the heat on in the car. After doing so I smelled something strange but thought that the smell was probably from the cloud of dust that I had just driven through on the road. To be on the safe side, I went ahead and turned the heat of and continued my drive. A couple of hundred yards later I noticed that not only had the smell not gone away it had gotten worse. That's when I decided to turn on the light in the car (it was night).

I was shocked to find that in the light I could see that the car was rapidly filling with smoke and it was coming from my climate controls! I pulled over as soon as I could, got my son out of the car, turned everything off and opened the doors hoping that the smoke would clear up and maybe we could go home. I sat there waiting. Thinking to myself, "Any minute now". Waiting. Continuing to thing, "It's almost done." That's when I realized that it was not going to stop smoking.

Being the bright bulb that I am, I decided to go investigate what could be causing all of this smoke. I looked inside and noticed that there was still a glow behind the climate controls. As I looked closer I audibly exclaimed, "Oh! It's on fire!" Now my son asked me if I was going to call 911, which is strange because I was still several steps away from that decision in my mind. But that made me snap to that decision right away. I called the dispatcher:

"Hello, 911 Dispatch, what's your emergency?"

"Umm, hello, yes, my car seems like it might be a little bit on fire?"

"Is it on fire or not sir?"

"Well, there's a fire. It's in the car, but I can't be too sure that it's actually the car that is burning."

"What kind of car is it sir?"

"It's a volkswagen, do you want to buy it?"

"No sir, where are you located"

I went on to explain where I was, I'm sure with more words than were needed. When I got off the phone with her I decided to peek in the car again. Now a button had melted off the climate controls and flames were coming out of the console. I was not about to wait for my car to be consumed by flames while I waited for the fire department. I grabbed my son's water bottle from the game and started spraying. When all the water was gone I stopped and noticed the fire was out.

When the firefighters got there they were disappointed, "To tell you the truth, we really hoped that your car was ablaze." Gee, thanks guys. We got everything eventually taken care of and my car got repaired and you can't even tell that it ever was on fire.


So those are my car stories. I hope you enjoyed them. The lesson of the story is this: If you ever ride in the car with me, watch out for people waving, coffee and fires. Do that and you should make it through just fine.