Our trip to San Francisco promised to take a relative million years, and it did, but it somehow got worse than that along the way. It was long enough that we slept and woke more times than I know, and when we arrived, we still hadn’t arrived. I’ll tell you, sleeping in the car is okay when you’re driving, but once you’re there, well, it’s for the birds; seagulls in this case, but maybe lemurs too.
And we’re not lemurs, even if we do run en masse towards crevasses.
We left at noon and should have arrived between midnight and two in the morning, but we vetoed the plan and demanded tons of unscheduled play breaks, plus the weather driving down was unseasonably ghastly, so my chauffeur had to cool his jets. Turns out you can’t break the traffic laws for expediency by even small margins when you’re wholly consumed by your desire to not drive off the road.
We got in to town five hours behind schedule, and our reservations had dissolved somewhere along the way. Some silly number of conventions and sporting events were in town so it took us ten tries to find a place that would take us, no matter how handsome and popular we are, but we’re trooper folk, so the adventure doesn’t stop there any more than it had merely begun there either.
Left – Here you can see the act of waking up midstream. It’s pretty tiring, but when you gotta wake up, you gotta wake up.
We tried to crash for a few quick winks in the car, since we were all pretty out of it and it was only a few hours until our first appointment. Alcatraz doesn’t allow changes or refunds once a ticket’s purchased, so you just have to be there, and we were as committed (professionally) as we should be committed (mentally).
This is a short article, as the whole point, however unfunny it may be, is that you shouldn’t be sleeping in your car. Not just because it’s uncomfortable and unfulfilling, but because it’s scary, often illegal and just as often dangerous. If you’re planning a trip all by your lonesome and want to sleep in your car, you can consider it, but if you’re traveling with kids, you need to be the responsible grownup and do the right thing. Your kids won’t understand your budget or know what the moths in your coin purse equate to, and they shouldn’t have to learn it this way.
Needless to say, we buckled down and found a place to get a quick nap before we headed out to tear up the town, but our lack of planning meant that all we found was a premium priced roadside dive that was already torn up before we got there. Sheesh, how would they ever even notice if we vandalized the place?
Above – If that isn’t the face of a kid zonked out, I don’t know what is… but seriously, that’s what it is, right?