“You knew,” he said.
For two hours, we bounced along that forgotten road. The canyon walls rose up on either side, striped like a jawbreaker. Sam fell asleep with his head on a stuffed pterodactyl. Mom passed back peanut butter crackers. And Dad didn’t say a word.
I didn’t have a compass. I didn’t have a GPS signal. All I had was a sunburn and a stupid sense of direction. But I pointed left, and he turned. blog amateur
“It’s a road ,” I said. “And we have a spare tire. And it’s three in the afternoon. And I’m tired of the Petrified Forest.”
For the first six days, everything went exactly to script. We saw the Petrified Forest (Dad took 200 photos of rocks). We ate at a diner where the waitress called us “hon.” We sang “Sweet Caroline” so many times that Sam threatened to jump out of the moving vehicle. “You knew,” he said
So we went. The four of us: Dad, Mom, Sam (12, obsessed with pterodactyls), and me, sulking in the passenger seat with a copy of On the Road that I’d only read three pages of.
Sam woke up. “Whoa,” he said.
Then, somewhere outside of Moab, Utah, the map ran out of ink.