Patience

“ Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”

-Aristotle.

True patience only shows when it is tested; by the umpteenth hour in the car ride, my patience was shot. Although a road trip to Tennessee and back seems like a challenge, when surrounded by my cousins and family, it must be okay? Right? At least that’s what I thought until we hit the 13 hour mark on the ride from Tennessee to D.C.

    Although the ride from Hershey Pennsylvania to Churchill Down in Kentucky was over ten hours, and Nashville Tennessee was only a few hours further, the ride from Tennessee to D.C. was worse than any trip I have ever taken, and I have had some real bad ones, 8 hours to the middle of nowhere in New York, 10 hours to the Niagara Falls, 10 hours through swamp lands from Huston to New Orleans, 5 hours on a boat in 5+ foot waves, all where dwarfed by this infinite drag through forest after forest.

    At the three-hour mark in our ride we stopped to hike a mountain. Yes, a mountain. Why, you may ask, I have no idea. It ended up being an incredible waste of time. It was a hill compared to the mountains in New Hampshire, which are also small, but comparing the two is like comparing a rocket and a tricycle. Very few similarities. The hike to the peak took a good hour and a half on what could have been a walking path, not a rock in sight, and hardly curved. But the view at the top was, horrible, all that could be seen was the trunks of the trees that were ten feet away from you. Then my cousin who has a phobia of everything had to go to the bathroom, so me, my older sister, and my other cousin sprinted to the bottom. In twenty minutes. Finally, gasping for breath at the bottom, we made it to the bathroom. An outdated porta-potty. At this point I was thinking, could this day get any worse? Yes, yes it could.

    A few hours and many bathroom breaks later complaints filled the air. My patience was on the verge of collapsing. With no service on my phone to escape the cramped backseat of the hot and loud car, I was slowly losing it. At long last we stopped, and I escaped that microscopic seat I have called home for the last eternity. But we still were not there, not even close actually. Our car G.P.S. had us arriving in D.C. at five, in the morning. As someone who suffers from an inability to sleep in a car, I knew that I should not have agreed to this senseless torture. Dinner was over and we were back on the roads. It was one in the morning and the car was asleep, all besides my mom, my aunt and myself. We came up to an unchanging light, and being the only ones insane enough to be up at this hour decided to skip it. Of course there was a police officer. After a long argument by my half delusional mother and my completely gone aunt, we got away with a warning. Lucky us. Back on the road once again. It's now 4. I still was awake despite my best efforts to fall asleep. Now we entered the suburbs. For some ungodly reason there was no traffic entering D.C. maybe it had something to do with that anyone with half a brain cell was asleep. The trip from the suburbs to our hotel was uninteresting, luckily, but once again all hell broke loose once we entered the hotel. The front desk employee was way too energetic, but he was okay. Maybe sleep was an option. Once we traversed, by stair because the elevator had shut down, to the fifth floor, we found out our key cards did not work. After sitting in the hallway for a good half an hour, the staff came to our rescue. By now it was five thirty and my eyes were glued shut, but at long last we made it. Never has anything seemed more appealing to me than that twin bed I had to share. The last thing I heard before I fell asleep was,

      “Everyone up at 7:30!”

      These road trips are an annual tradition, and luckily this was the worst ride of all, worse than our trek to Montreal, worse than our pilgrimage to all of the Great Lakes, and even longer than our voyage through the arid land of Texas. I can’t wait for our Grand Canyon excursion this year!