It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Trip

By Kevin James Shay

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Trip: On the Road of the Longest Two-Week Family Road Trip in History chronicles the adventures of a single Dad taking his two kids on a 6,950-mile odyssey across the USA and back during his two-week vacation in 2013.
They set a record for the longest family road trip in a roughly two-week span, certified by RecordSetter, the Wikipedia generation’s version of Guinness World Records. And they did it in their trusty 2001 Honda CRV that began with more than 165,000 miles.
They tried to locate some Hollywood celebrities, rode roller coasters and water slides, swam in the Pacific Ocean, met some aliens at a UFO center in Sedona, sat on a ledge on top of the country's tallest building in Chicago, spray painted Cadillac Ranch, dodged mule poop at the Grand Canyon, and bought a pressed coin near Old Faithful.
Their book also lends tips, websites and other info on attractions, fun facts, and more resources, to help you with your own Great American Adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312295018

Book preview

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Trip

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Trip: On the Road of the Longest Two-Week Family Road Trip in History

By Kevin James Shay

with Preston Shay and McKenna Shay

Copyright © 2014 by Kevin James Shay

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-312-29501-8

Published by Lulu Press, Raleigh, N.C.

Also by Kevin James Shay:

Walking through the Wall [Lulu Press, Raleigh, N.C., 2012]

A Parent’s Guide to Dallas/Fort Worth [Parent’s Guide Press, Los Angeles, 2003]

And Justice for All: The Untold History of Dallas, with Roy H. Williams [CGS Communications, Fort Worth, 1999]

Sex, Lies & Newsprint: Tales from a North Dallas Police Blotter [The Register, Dallas, 1991]

Dedication

To Mom and Dad,

who whet our appetite

for insanely long

road trips

You got to be careful

if you don’t know where you’re going,

because you might not get there.

— Yogi Berra,

Hall of Fame baseball player, manager, philosopher

Introduction

In the summer of 2013, I sought a different kind of two-week vacation with my two kids. Divorced since 2006, I had driven them a few times from our home near Washington, D.C., to Dallas, Texas, where their grandma and other relatives lived. I had driven them to New York City and other destinations.

We had also flown to Disney World and to Dallas a few other times.

As the Griswold’s of National Lampoon’s Vacation and others have discovered, nothing quite bonds a family like sitting in a vehicle together for seemingly endless hours barreling down some God-forsaken stretch of road in the middle of nowhere. It’s the American equivalent of Family Nirvana. Or Family Something Else That We Won’t Say Here Because We Are Trying To Be Polite.

Places like Mount Rushmore, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, and Walley World become our Mecca. Most families are content to make it to one of those destinations in a single drive during their annual vacations. Not us. Not on this trip. We had to make it to all of them and more. Except for Walley World. We tried to find that place but failed. Maybe it had been closed permanently after Clark Griswold’s little BB gun incident.

Don’t ask why we had to cram so much in our journey. As the title of this book suggests, I can be a bit mad. It’s in my genes, or jeans.

If I had to give you an answer as to why I would drive 6,950 miles in 17 days alone with my teen-age son and pre-teen daughter who seem to gain joy from teasing each other, I would first shrug and bide for time by asking you, Why do you want to know?

After thinking about it, I would say something along the lines of because when I’m back working at the Daily Grind, I want to feel like I really did something on my vacation. I’ve never been content with lying around some beach or mountain cabin for too long during a vacation. That is good for a day or two, but not a week or two.

I also enjoy showing the kids parts of the country they haven’t been. My mom and dad did that to Kathy, Patrick, and me when we were growing up. So I have to return the favor. Look it up ― it’s in The Parenting Bible on page 313. Or is that page 666?

As a bonus, we set the World Record for the Longest Family Road Trip by a Single-Parent Driver in 17 Days or Less in a Vehicle with at least 165,000 Miles. That was verified by RecordSetter, a Las Vegas-based company that is the Wikipedia generation’s version of the longtime Guinness World Records outfit.

Or was it the Longest Two-Week Vacation in History? At times, it seemed that way, driving almost 7,000 miles with two kids on my own in roughly two weeks.

Besides telling a story and attempting to create some humorous cartoons from photos, we provide tips, details on attractions we visited on this trip and a few previous ones, fun facts to inform and amuse you on your journeys, and more. This book is more than a stab at entertainment; we are Scouts and seek to be helpful, informative, courteous, kind, brave, clean, and reverent.

Well, maybe just relatively clean and not too reverent. And not quite as helpful, kind, and courteous as we used to be. But then, who is? Even Martha Stewart, whose prison name was M. Diddy, was locked up for doing some unkind things, such as supposedly lying to the gummint. The nerve of that woman. I will never look at a Chocolate Crepe Souffle that Stewart makes in the same way again. I would still eat it, though.

So, sit tight. Buckle up.

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad trip.

Chapter One: Are we there yet?

Forget the apples. Slap some bacon on a biscuit and let’s go. We’re burning daylight!

― John Wayne, The Cowboys, 1972

7:30 a.m. Saturday, June 29, 2013

The first mile is down, as we depart from close to the easternmost 18-foot-high Madonna of the Trail statue. In the 1920s, the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution created a dozen statues that were placed in areas from Bethesda, Md., to Upland, Calif., honoring the pioneering mothers who traveled west with their mad husbands.

Our goal, like those pioneers, is to reach the Pacific Ocean, or a reasonable proximity in the West. But as we motor towards Frederick, which holds the title as the second largest city in Maryland, I can’t remember what the first is. I can’t even remember where California is. I pray we are driving in the right direction.

McKenna looks up from reading The Reinvention of Moxie Roosevelt.

Daddy, she asks, how far are we driving today?

It’s a fair question. McKenna is a bright, inquisitive student of life, 10 going on 20. With a kind, yet adventurous, spirit, she had been born a rambling girl, moving halfway across the country before she was even one year old and traveling through almost half the states by the time she was six. She does her homework without me even asking and makes straight A’s on school work beyond her grade level. She helps me with chores, sometimes even with a smile on her face.

But her smile and voracious book reading mask a determined, competitive nature; she had been a scoring machine for her city basketball team, the Gaithersburg Mystics, in her younger days. She won a bowling tournament for her age group and awards for academics, Girl Scouts, and art projects, and played the trombone in her school orchestra. She knows all three High School Musical movies by heart, though she does not admit to watching any of those Disney movies these days.

But I can’t be completely honest and say, Oh, just 400 miles. Even McKenna the Adventurous Traveler would want to bail out right there.

So I say, Just down the road a bit. Then I point to an imaginary animal on the side of the road to try to divert attention from my non-answer. Look! There’s Toby!

I miss Toby, McKenna says of her mixed-breed doggie the kids and their mom rescued from a local pound a few years back. That will become one of the most popular statements on this trip.

Somehow Preston hears McKenna’s voice while listening to Bruno Mars, Macklemore, Nickelback, and more through earbuds attached to his MP3 player. You’re stupid, McKenna! he roars from the passenger side seat.

It’s a good thing Preston can sit up front and not have to sit in the back seat with McKenna, as he did on previous long road trips. Thank God for the barrier between front and back seats, I think.

When motivated, Preston can conquer worlds. The trick is keeping his 13-year-old mind motivated. Almost 6 feet tall, his frame is stronger and more athletic than mine was at his age. He is coming off breakout seasons in the Rockville Baseball Association, where he made the league All-Star game while leading his team in home runs and playing first base like Adam LaRoche, and the Rockville city basketball league, where he led his team in rebounding and blocked shots.

He is not happy about missing Boy Scout summer camp for the first time in three years, as I want to use the Fourth of July holiday for part of this vacation.

He has worked hard to keep his grades up and made the honor roll for numerous semesters. He won awards for scouting, photography, writing, and athletics. Though he doesn’t want any of his friends to know, he has acted in church, school, and civic plays before large crowds, and had a major role in a community church production a few months before.

Though not as physically strong as Preston, McKenna refuses to back down. You’re stupid! she retorts.

Okay! No one is stupid! I interject. That is another dishonest answer. I’m stupid for taking on this trip.

Am I really driving my kids by myself all the way across the country and back in about two weeks in our trusty, beat-up, tough 2001 Honda CRV with 165,000 miles on it? Have I bit off more than I can chew this time?

Preston tries to hit McKenna, and she sends a foot his way. It’s on.

Okay, okay! Stop fighting! I yell, finding by experience that yelling louder than they yell is the quickest way to get them to stop shoving each other.

It maybe wasn’t the best way, but when you’re driving 400 or so miles a day with no other adult to help, you have to nip the fight in the bud before it gets out of hand. You don’t have the time, energy, or format to conduct a Dr. Phil-type counseling session.

That had been Mom’s technique when she took us along these roads. She would usually jump into the sibling arguments well before Dad. When Dad had to yell, we had really gone too far.

As suddenly as the fight erupts, it quiets down. I settle into my seat and turn up the radio. Preston changes the station from my favorite classic-rock one to an outfit that plays more modern hits. I sigh and try to tune out Icona Pop singing about crashing a car into a bridge before I somehow twist that idea into a good one.

Gonna be a long trip, I think. And it has barely started.

McKenna soon interrupts the song. Daddy, she begins, and I gladly turn down the radio, why are we driving again all the way to Mount Rushmore and maybe California? Why didn’t we fly out there?

Because Daddy’s too cheap to fly, Preston chips in.

No, Preston, that’s not it. I sigh, trying to explain about the long road trips of my youthful summers and how I seek to recreate that experience. You can see and learn about the country a lot more by driving than by flying.

Why on earth would we want to do that? Preston asks.

I ignore him. There is another reason that I want to drive, rather than fly. A long road trip helps develop mental toughness that my kids would need throughout life. You are cooped up for long hours, forced to retrain your mind away from the temptations of instant gratification all around you. Some parents deprive their kids of television and video games for much the same reason; that’s not me, though.

As a single Dad, I need some help to divert their attention from bothering each other. I use these types of road trips as a symbolic and direct lesson that teaches patience, resourcefulness, and flexibility, not to mention helps retain our human nature.

But I can’t explain all that to the kids. The only way I can do that is to show them. Onward.

Fun facts

The first road trip all the way across the USA by automobile was taken by physician Horatio Nelson Jackson and mechanic Sewall K. Crocker way back in 1903. They drove 4,500 bumpy miles from San Francisco to New York City in 63-and-a-half days in a Winton touring car.

The cost: $8,000, or more than $200,000 in today’s dollars.

The longest direct driving distance across the continental USA is 3,643 miles between Birch Bay, Wash., and Key West, Fla. The shortest driving distance is 2,340 miles between San Diego and Jacksonville, Fla.

Football Mecca

We pull into the parking lot of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, a little after 3 p.m. Somehow, we are pretty much on our rough schedule.

I don’t want to go to a football hall of fame, McKenna announces. It’s booooorrrring.

You’re boring, responds Preston, as big a sports fan as I was in my teen years. This is the football hall of fame. Show some respect.

C’mon, it’ll be fun, I interject. It’s a museum. You can always find something interesting in a museum.

McKenna has a point that some halls of fame can be boring. If the museums honoring a sport, industry, or avocation — from the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame in Davis, Calif., to the Robot Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh — aren’t a dime a dozen, they have to be a dollar a dozen.

Most sports-themed venues have seen attendance decline in recent years. The National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., only attracted about 260,000 in 2012, the lowest since the mid-1980s. The NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C., welcomed some 185,000 visitors in 2012, about 33 percent fewer than in 2010. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., and the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto also reported attendance declines from the previous decade.

Even the prestigious Smithsonian institutions in Washington, D.C., and New York — which have four of the 15 most visited museums in the world and two of the top three — saw overall attendance down from 31.7 million visitors in 2001 to about 30 million in 2013. The total had rebounded from a post 2001 low of 20.4 million in 2004.

The pro football hall saw the number of visitors rise from about 63,000 in its first full year in 1964 to some 330,000 by 1973. Attendance dwindled to as low as 165,000 in 2001, though it increased to 208,000 in 2013. Some experts who have nothing better to do but study this kind of thing say one problem is that a lot of young people supposedly aren’t that interested in the past.

Preston devotes about an equal amount of time on historic memorabilia from past NFL greats like Jim Thorpe as he does on modern-day artifacts, such as a jersey worn by one of his favorite players, Russell Wilson. There is also the actual 2014 Super Bowl trophy that would be won by one of his favorite teams, the Seattle Seahawks.

He learns that Thorpe started with the Canton Bulldogs, an early-day football