My Cheeks Are Still Chaffing From This One

I present to you pictures of beautiful Sedona, Arizona, from our most recent road trip.



Don’t you love the color of the red rocks? It really is beautiful.



No, there is nothing wrong with my photography skills, I am an average girl with middling talent. What you are experiencing is my husband’s idea of a road trip and I fell for it again, today! Usually, husband says, “Let’s go for a drive.” I respond, with, “Sure, where do you want to go?” “I’m not sure, let’s head North.” Well, I smartened up after, um, 6 or 7 years of that shit. Now, we have a destination in mind or we don’t go, because once we are strapped into that car, there is NO getting out.

Until recently, our family drives followed a pattern of:
~ hubby drives,
~ kids scream or whine or fight or all 3 at once,
~ they sleep for 5 minutes,
~ more screaming (usually by now, I have joined the chorus),
~ then, kids scream for food,
~ yelling, with peppered use of profanity
~ we go to a drive-thru to get food (remember NO stopping allowed),
~ quiet for 2 minutes while kids shovel food into their mouths,
~ kids sleep,
~ we turn around and kids scream for the next 2.5 hours, while we drive home.

When my boys have to go to the bathroom, he pulls off to the side of the road and tells them to let it rip.

Fuck, and I am not even on Valium or any of that other happy mommy shit.

So, as I said, I was wise to this ploy and made sure we were headed for a real place and we were going to get out of the fucking car, walk around and eat IN an acceptable eating establishment. What I did not account for was all the other bored residents of Phoenix having the exact same epiphany on the exact same day we did. When we arrived, there was not a single parking spot in the whole accursed, tourist trap of a town. As we were driving through a parking lot, I whispered to my kids, “How much do you want to bet, Daddy takes the truck and peels out of here within the next minute and tells us, we are not getting to stay in Sedona?” “Mom,” says my oldest, “Daddy can hear you.” Five minutes later, as we are heading towards Flagstaff, hubs turns to me and says, “I didn’t peel out, so, na!”

The psychotic bastard would not even stop for my photo ops! What’s the big hurry? It’s our day off. Do you have hemorrhoids? I had to take my pictures from the window of a speeding car and just try timing a picture at 50 mph. All the while, I could hear him muttering to himself, “Too, many goddamned people! Look at all these fuckers! What the hell are the all doing?” Call me crazy, but it looks like they’re doing the same thing we planned on doing. Except, they're doing a lot better job of it.


PS....That little annoying pang in my gut, which most people refer to as a conscience (or is it just gas?), is forcing me to mention that we had a nice time in Flagstaff. We ate a nice meal in a restaurant and went to visit some nearby cave dwellings. It was so great, we may get back into the car and head to the Grand Canyon, but this time, I’m driving.