Relaxing, family bonding and sing-a-longs: all things that should have taken place on a car ride, right? Wrong! Welcome to, what I call, “The Fox Family Express.” Destination: disaster! My family car trips never go right. I should have learned by now that whenever something is going right, something bad is bound to happen.

And it all started on a hot, sunny morning…

It was a day I would never forget. My mom decided to take a whiney first grader and a “know-it-all” third grader on a car ride to Indiana. I can remember the most important phrase of the story as if my mother were saying it to me now, “it will only take two hours.” On that note, we started our journey. I could not stop smiling!

“Mommy, I gots to go potty, NOW,” my sister screamed as we made a quick right turn into one of those pit stops. My mom parked the car in a nice, sunny, decent spot, and all three of us went into McDonalds. My smile quickly faded as we made it back to our car.

“We are stuck here, forever! We are gonna’ die of thirst and hunger, and it is too hot,” I cried. Our car had overheated and would not start. Now, what was I saying about that wonderful, hot, sunny day? Oh yeah, it stunk!

We decided to walk over to the gas station to find a phone book to call a tow truck company. While my mom was inside asking for it, outside, there was a man with three Dalmatian puppies. When my mom came out, she allowed us to hold them, with the owners’ consent. My sister and I were in heaven until the puppies had to go. By now, we had been at the gas station for, what seemed like, hours. Finally, we found an open tow truck company and they came. Thank God! Eventually, we made it to a car dealership.

Our car was in the shop and it would not be fixed for a few days, so we decided to rent a car. The woman let us take it for a test run. We followed her car as we drove around. My mom saw her use the hand signals to turn, so we did. We found out later that she was trying to tell us to pull over because our front two tires had been spinning out of control, for a while. Not the best car dealership experience, but I lived through it. We were given another car, a safe car. And You are never going to believe what happened, the back tires on that car started going out of control. No, just kidding, back to the story. All we did was drive and drive, and did I mention DRIVE?

By this time we had been driving for SIX hours. It had started to storm. When I say storm, I don’t mean the ones you hear about in fairy tales, I mean the ones you hear about in Stephen King books. There was thunder, lightning, it was pitch black out, and, I forgot to mention, tornado weather. We did what any group of girls would do at this desperate time in our lives, pulled over and started to cry. As the clouds rained bullets outside, inside the car, our eyes rained tears. The radio wasn’t working and there was no one around for miles. We were in the middle of farm land or in my words, the middle of nowhere. We decided to keep driving, what else was there to do? Luckily, we found a gas station/restaurant about a half hour away. My mom ran in to try and get the scoop on the weather and try to figure out where in the world we were. She ran out and verified the weather, yippee, more good news, not! She figured out that we had about two hours until we would reach our destination.

Our tears had dried and even though we wanted to turn around, we were only two hours away, it couldn’t get any worse. Right? Wrong…

It was like a maze as the corn stalk walls surrounded the roads. More and more twists and turns as we drove and drove into the dark abyss. It was looking brighter as our desperation faded. No one passed; it was just us and the road. The radio started working and music filled our ears. Suddenly, it felt like we had driven over a speed bump.

“What was that?” I asked frightened out of my mind.

“A raccoon,” my mom sobbed. At that moment, I lost it. I couldn’t believe that all those horrible events had happened. I screamed, bawled, cried, whatever you want to call it. I lost it and so did everyone else in the car. We turned the car off and just sat there for a few minutes to try and recollect our bearings. I don’t know how much longer I could stand this car ride, but I kept the last of my composure, hoping this adventure would soon end. I looked up and I saw something in the distance.

It was a neighborhood, an actual place filled with people and houses. I was filled with delight. We had made it! When we made it to the families house we were going to stay at, they all greeted us with smiling faces and couldn’t wait for the story. It was a car ride I will never forget. I learned many valuable lessons during that trip. I learned to always expect the unexpected, make sure you check the weather forecast before taking a car ride, don’t run over raccoons, things can go from bad to worse very quickly, and watch out for the car rides from HELL!