The long way home

CousinFest '09 had to eventually come to an end, so Carol, Meelyn, Aisling and I said a tearful goodbye to Doug and Susie yesterday at about 1:30 p.m., with me thinking we'd have a regular, uneventful five hour drive ahead of us. It turned into about a six and a half hour drive because of a massive bottleneck of holiday traffic south of Louisville, but who's counting? Besides me and Carol, that is.

The was one event during that wait on the freeway that provided us with some entertainment. During one particularly loooooong period when we were at a complete halt, a young college age guy got out of a car about four ahead of us and loped over a couple of lanes and down a hill on the verge to a clump of trees -- he was obviously in desperate need of a bush stop. He looked over his shoulders, chagrined at the idea that the entire northbound lanes of interstate travelers in his immediate vicinity were avidly interested in watching him pee (you just can't look away from something like that; Carol and I tried, but failed) but managed to get things going. Unfortunately, so did the traffic. We began to roll forward for the first time in about ten minutes, picking up speed.

The guy looked over his shoulder again, noting the fact that the car with his three friends in it was beginning to move away, although they were trying to go as slow as possible (haha, I just made an error in the word 'possible' just now and struck the i key instead of the o -- that's a pretty funny typo) and he finished things off, zipped up and began to run frantically. The problem was that the faster he ran, the faster the traffic began to roll.

"Oh, f-------------------!!!!" he yelled as the three lanes sped up. His friends were in the far lane and I couldn't imagine how the poor guy was going to be able to dodge traffic in the right and center lanes to get back to his ride, where two other guy were hanging their heads out the windows watching for him with anxious but amused expressions. The driver was rolling along as slowly as he dared, but the people behind him were getting a little terse: Their lane was going much, much more slowly than the center and right lanes.

As we passed their car, we called out, "HE'S COMING!!!!!!"

"THANKS!!!" they bellowed.

"Poor guy," I said sympathetically to Carol. "You know he probably sat there, holding it as long as he could before he felt like he was fixin' to bust." (I always adopt a slight southern accent after a few days with Susie.)

"I bet he'll never travel without an empty bottle again," she replied.

We got back to Carol's and shifted over a mountain of luggage from her car to ours and the girls and I took off for home without even going in for a pee pee break ourselves. Other than the fact that Aisling tried to read a thick Arbonne catalog aloud to Meelyn and me all the way home, the trip was uneventful, although I did have to threaten to stuff her into the trunk if she didn't stop rhapsodizing about skin care, spa treatments and cosmetics. I mean, I like the Arbonne products too, but that doesn't mean I want to hear a fourteen year old twittering on about them for hours on end.

On the other hand, Aisling is going to make an amazing, top-notch consultant someday. Susie may end up with that white Mercedes solely because of the white-hot heat of Aisling's enthusiam. It almost burned up that catalog.