Today I head out on a road trip with my son. Our journey is a 1,527 miles from chic and trendy Dunstable, Massachusetts to New Orleans, Louisiana (or N’Orleans, or Nawlins, or…. oh screw it. I can do a Boston accent. Y’all have nothin’ on me.). Anyway, the car is packed up with bedding and clothing. And, in a little while, we’ll slide Olive gently into her coveted spot (coveted by my daughter Mac’s Tigger Pillow Pet (she’s meeting us in New Orleans, where we will consume beignets and then she and I will drive to Danville, Kentucky to drop her off at school)). I offered to use our frequent flier miles to fly both Mac and Sam down, while I drove, blissfully alone listening to an audio book by Dostoyevsky, and by that I mean E.L. James.

Ok, no. I don’t really mean E.L. James. E.L. James wrote the Fifty Shades of Grey series. Which is like soft porn. I would so like to have left you with that racy, spiritually free and open view of myself, but I can’t do it.  If you made me listen to those books in the car, I’d be mortified. Probably gripping the steering wheel, blushing and staring straight ahead, too embarrassed to make eye contact with anyone. The people driving by me would think I was a catatonic sunburn victim.

What?

No I’m not going to tell you if I’ve read it.

Get your minds out of the gutter. I’m telling a story here.

So I surprised my cherubic children with the offer of flying and meeting me in New Orleans, thus avoiding the long, boring car ride with Mom.  And my son was not at all for it. He was not going to miss our road trip.  He was up for the adventure.  Plus, Olive is his girl.

Oh wait, did I forget to clarify who Olive is? I think I did. Olive is Sam’s ladylove – she is this beautiful, sultry being with curves in all the right places. Her low, husky tones can awaken the passions and yearnings in any soul, and cause sedate, repressed persons to shed their inhibitions and plunge head long into…

E.L. James, eat your heart out.

Olive is Sam’s upright bass.

Sam is studying jazz in New Orleans.  We drive each year because, though we love Jet Blue (and it’s personal TV screens and happy employees), we don’t trust them with Olive. It’s worth the drive to ensure she reaches Loyola in one piece.  Plus Sam and I travel awesomely together.

The ride quickly becomes a series of musical, philosophical, anecdotal pontifications on just about anything.  And the music can range from Charles Mingus to Bare Naked Ladies, from the Canadian Tenors to Fleetwood Mac. And all that is augmented by the many, many comical (and sometimes tragic, but turn comical pretty quickly) things that can happen along the way of a 24ish hour car ride. But mostly we are just talking a lot so we don’t have to focus on the Bridge.

The George Washington Bridge.

The George Washington Bridge is my stalker.

I’m totally serious. And if you don’t believe me you can ask Sam, because once upon a time, he didn’t believe me either.  But now he does.

Because he has experienced the horror personally.

Here is what is going to happen in just a few hours: Olive will take her place of honor in my car. She will be cradled by pillows and comforters and other items will be put in afterward to ensure she does not move around during our journey. The coffin will be filled (The coffin is the, uh, coffin – looking thing bolted to the top of the Way Back Machine. The Way Back Machine is my station wagon, which has a back seat, then a ‘way back’ area (plus I was a big Sherman and Mr. Peabody fan as a kid). Are you keeping up?

Good.

Sam and I will then take our places in the cockpit and I will plug my phone in and scroll to the ‘Wicked Long Rides in Car‘ playlist (true) and we will be on our way.  Sam will choose the first topic of the day as we pass Mr. McGovern’s cows on Forest Street and we will turn onto Route 113. Blind Melon will come on and we will stop to sing about our lives being pretty strange and liking watching puddles gather rain and we will glide onto Route 3, heading south, and we might – might – make it all the way to the Mass Pike before Sam tentatively asks about the Bridge.

Here’s the deal.

I avoid the George Washington Bridge as if it is swathed in ebola. I am not a fan. The thing freaks me out. There’s like a billion decisions to make miles before you approach it, and I never make the right decisions. And it’s always a near-catastrophy. And there are two levels of the bridge, one for trucks and one for cars. What bridge does that?!

I inevitably end up in the one for trucks.

Big ones with horns and hulking drivers who have been specially trained somewhere in New York to intimidate folks from small towns in Massachusetts-and-sometimes Maine. Yes. That’s me. Also, I’m not really sure who exactly was in charge of designing the bridge-based land-mine-slash-pothole field that has been laid with great precision before and after the Bridge, but this guy is a genius of tire-popping proportions and hated second only to the sign guy.

Ya. The sign guy.

If I ever find the sign guy, I assure you that he will be much more afraid of me than I ever was of the GW bridge. And I am terrified of the GW Bridge. So the sign guy should hide.

Why?

Because here’s how it goes:

Miles before most people even think about the GW Bridge (not me, I’ve been thinking about it for weeks), signs happen.

They say things like, ‘Once you get to a certain place, you should slide right if you want to go over the GW Bridge’. Then, as you get closer they say something like, “When we say, ‘right’, we don’t mean all the way right, we mean in the lane just next to the right most lane’. Then, when you are about two miles away from the exit that will bring you toward the Bridge, you see a sign that reminds you to stay right but, since you have read the other signs, you know that this does not mean totally right. But you question yourself, and that is when the feeling starts. Deep in your belly. And you wonder if you read the last sign correctly. So you check the MapQuest printout that you keep next to you just in case and it is no help.

A half-mile to go.

Stay right.

Sort of.

You can see another sign coming up.

Cars around you are driving crazy (so you know you are near New York City) and your anxiety builds further.

You stay firmly in your lane, even though you are being tailgated by an 18-wheeler driven by a guy with a face tattoo that would give Mike Tyson pause. Your grip on the steering wheel tightens. You can see another sign coming up. You stay in your sort of right lane. The sign comes into view and you see a word highlighted. And that word is left.

LEFT!

But left is impossible.

Because there is now a wall of pissed off people (probably due to years of bad signage) and they will not let you in.

And it isn’t until you have risked your life and car to get in the correct lane and finally take the exit toward the George Washington Bridge that you realize you aren’t really even very close to the George Washington Bridge. Seriously. You are still about twenty miles and 73 misleading signs away from actually getting to the bridge. And may God bless you thrice if you get in the wrong lane there. I am telling you. With a choice between navigating the Bridge and plunging headlong into the Hudson River, I have been tempted to try for a water landing, Captain Sully style.

Improbable but not impossible.

So after several terrifying trips across the GW, I am done.

Done.

So there is this other bridge. A seven-lane behemoth that carries me and millions of my closest friends from New York toward New Jersey. It shuttles us from one side of the Hudson to the other at one of the River’s widest points. There are potholes and beeping and a huge honkin’ toll booth.

And it is like being bathed in sunshine, and light, and sweet baby harp seals compared to the George Washington Bridge.

So now I plot my route to the south using the Tappan Zee Bridge vs. the GW.

Piece o’ cake, right?

No.  And Sam and I have found this out the hard way.

He didn’t believe me when I told him that the George Washington Bridge was my stalker. I got the eye rolls of a kid who has lived with me for his entire life.

He knows my stories of the GW. The first time I tried to avoid the GW but ended up there anyway, I blamed it on one great song (Cheap Tricks I Want You to Want Me), belted out at the top of my lungs with such intensity that it caused me to miss the exit that would lead me to the Tappan Zee.

The second time, it could have been Tom Petty’s American Girl.

The third time, I started to get alarmed.

By the forth time that I ended up at the George Washington Bridge after painstakingly planning my way around it, I knew. I wasn’t finding that bridge by accident.

It was finding me.

I told Sam about this on our first trip down to New Orleans. I explained that the George Washington Bridge could appear out of nowhere, at almost any second. As we followed our directions exactly, through Connecticut and into New York, and actually ended up at the Tappan Zee Bridge, Sam was gleeful. We had made it. We had made it across the river and into New Jersey and were on our way – unencumbered by the bridge or any George Washington Bridge-induced post traumatic stress issues (like being incapable of locating a Five Guy’s burger joint). But I explained to him that the GW could pop up around any corner, at any time, and even in any state.  He understood.

Sam was warning me about the potential of that damn Bridge materializing around bends in the mountains in West Virginia. Sure, we were laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe, and the GW jokes were a big part of the rest of the ride down. Mainly because we hadn’t encountered the Bridge, so all was well.

It hadn’t happened. But it could have.

Sam was calm and care-free. But deep down, I wasn’t.

I had to make it all the way back to Massachusetts without encountering the Bridge. And then I would be heading back to get him (and Olive) in the spring. He is my child. I am responsible for him, and keeping him out of harm’s way.

Fast forward to last spring.

Sam and I are on our way back from New Orleans. We were doing the trip in only two legs, and had planned a super long last day – 14 hours of driving. We were 9 hours in, a little behind schedule but not much and approaching New York City. We had our car’s navigation system programmed, and our backup, printed out MapQuest directions. All aiming us toward the friendly embrace of the Tappan Zee Bridge.

We were on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River.

We were nervous, but following our directions closely.  We could actually see the GW, off to our right, in the distance.

I shuddered.

As we passed by it, I felt a little better. The signage was if-y and confusing, but we kept going. Keeping right on the highway. Right. Bearing Left. Right. Under a little bridge. Right. Left. Right onto a smaller side road. Through a little neighborhood. It seemed weird to be in a neighborhood. But the streets were all spelled out on the car’s navigation system. Up over a rise. Turn to the right and there was some traffic and suddenly the George Washington Bridge was right in front of us.

There was nowhere to go, nothing we could do. I threw my forearm across Sam’s chest to protect him. This was it. The end.

Then Sam spotted an escape hatch – er – exit off to the right. We had to cross two lanes of traffic to get there. Two lanes of New York City traffic.

It was them, or us.

We crossed those two lanes of New York City traffic like a knife slicing though butter – crookedly and hesitatingly – but we did it. We made it to the exit.

And that mistake cost us almost four hours of travel time between traffic and a couple of other navigational errors. We were never so happy to reach home, after eighteen hours in the car. Not because we were happy to get out of the car, but because we had avoided the George Washington Bridge when all seemed lost. We had survived to fight (well, navigate) another day.

And now that day has come.

Today is the day.

It is our hour.

We will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night!” We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate…

Okay. I stole that entire thing from Independence Day.

But you get the idea. Sam and I are about to go into a battle of wits with the George Washington Bridge. Should we win the day – and avoid the bridge – I will be back to share photos and stories from our journey to New Orleans, and then Mac’s and my journey to Kentucky.

Pray for us, good readers – any deity of your choice is fine. We are not choosy.

Thanks for readin’.