Road Trip... A story of the open road, told in chapters

Prologue

I decided to take my parents on a trip for their 40th wedding anniversary. A road trip to San Francisco, via the Oregon coast was soon decided upon. I would foot the bill for it all... food, gas, accommodations and attractions. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself until a few days later my father bailed out. When I re-iterated that this was an anniversary present for he and mom, he still didn't want to go, citing his health and inability to keep up with us. I tried to convince him otherwise, but could not change his mind. Now the poor man is stuck in Edmonton babysitting my two cats along with my mom's two dogs.... all of whom could win the douche-bag of the year contest-pet division.

And so the trip has been planned (my darling mother was given the task of booking motels and hotels along the way which necessitated researching mileage between stops and figuring it out what attractions we wanted to see and how long it would take us to do everything we wanted). We were to leave as soon as I was off work on Thursday... throw her bags in the trunk and hit the open road. What actually happened is that my cat, who had been at my parent's house for 4 days heard me come home and thought she was going to be thrown in her carrier and hid. Hid so well we couldn't find her when I wanted to say goodbye. Hid so well, we spent 30 minutes looking for her and believing she got out. My mother was muttering hateful things about my cat and I, in turn, was muttering hateful words about her attitude. We finally found her under a bed we had each looked under twice before. Tensions were still running high when we piled in the car. We made it as far as Stony Plain when I realized I couldn't see out of my streaky, dirty windshield. We stopped and bought Windex, since I had forgotten to pack some. After much spraying and wiping and veiled comments by us both about how late it was, we were finally on our way.