On the Road with My Father

When we were young my parents used to take us on camping trips around Canada. Sometimes it would only be to the next province, or sometimes it would be all the way to Vancouver from Winnipeg. Us kids would be in the back sleeping,or under the blankets to avoid their cigarette fumes. We slept to kill the long boring ride through the prairies that just seemed to be the same farmhouse, silo and field repeated over and over and over again for thousands of miles.

My dad kept himself amused by seeing how little fuel his blue VW Beetle could use. His favourite trick was to tailgate trucks. He noticed that there was a fair amount of suction behind of of these monsters, so we'd be literally pulled from town to town. It wasn't exactly safe, but hey! As an added bonus we'd get to our destination heaps faster than if we were going under our own steam.

Eventually my parents gave up camping and they used the car mainly to go to work and to buy groceries. Well, by that I mean my father. Even though my mother did have a driver's licence and passed her test first go, he never let her drive the car. That's despite the fact that my father's eyesight was so poor he always needed someone with him to tell him if the light was green or red. His eyesight was pretty poor, but the only accident he'd ever been in was when he had a bee in the car. He got so scared he crashed the car into a pole. He wasn't hurt, don't know what happened to the bee.

Anyway, we all survived so that's all that matters, right? Ah, the good old days.......