Road Trip Lunch Menu: Schlotzsky's, Death

No! Not another post-awards concert
reception with post-reception awards!

It's been a little bit, hasn't it? It has been a busy little bit. May is when the tsunami that is school finally reaches its crest and crashes into the boardwalk that is a parent's life, causing them to run screaming from their inevitable drowning in concerts, recitals, awards ceremonies, and end-of-year parties, so that, once their lungs are filled with the water of their own overwhelmed tears, their children can then proceed to beat them back to life with sticks, shouting, "I'M BORED!" precisely three days after school lets out. It's tradition.

Unfortunately, it is a tradition I forgot about when I made the decision to plan our annual family vacation for two days after school let out. So we went careening from a busy end-of-year into a 2,900 mile road trip through the four states of the four corners: New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona.

The useless green of lettuce
and the foul juiciness of
tomatoes reminds one of
mortality: snot and blood
on a lightly toasted bun.

As with any time in which loving family members are enclosed in a metal cage for nine days, memories were made. For instance, Bruce may never live down The Great Sweetwater Schlotzsky's Incident of 2017. Eleanor and Betty were enthusiastic about eating at Schlotzsky's; Bruce had never been before. It was a bad sign when he stared at the enormous menu board for five minutes before ordering a dry turkey bacon sandwich with no vegetables. (Bruce has always had a deep loathing of condiments, being possibly the only child to survive toddlerhood without liking ketchup.) Then the food came, followed shortly by levels of drama that would make a telenovela actress blush.

What unfeeling monster
puts mayonnaise on a
sandwich, when white
is the goopiness of non-
being, the nothing to which
all life inevitably wends?

First: the mournful look. Lift the bun--someone left on a bit of tomato, a scattering of lettuce, and, God help us all, mayonnaise. Staring despondently at the monstrosity, contemplate the bleak emptiness of lunch. Sigh a lot. Loudly. When your sisters laugh hysterically at you, poke at the sandwich a bit with a knife as though seeking a meaning that you just know isn't there. Slump your shoulders and shake your head. It is a waste, like the Gobi desert, there is nothing here to savor. More sighs, sighs like the last strains of joy escaping from a particularly despondent ghost. When your mother, between snorts of laughter, tells you you're not getting any snacks and suggests scraping off the mayonnaise and vegetables, pick up the knife and begin slowly, methodically scraping the mayonnaise off of each individual shaving of turkey, each flick of the plastic knife radiating the cruel emptiness of a world in which people expect you to eat sandwiches with condiments.

Finally, after Bruce sighed his way through half a sandwich and a bag of chips, we all gave up and got back in the car. For the rest of the trip, the girls would amuse themselves by randomly pointing out the window and yelling, "OOOOOH! Mom! A Schlotzsky's! Can we go there?" Even in towns way too small to support a Schlotzsky's, Bruce's head would pop up from his Nintendo and he would wail, "NO! Please, Mom! No!" At which, the girls would snort with laughter. They will still be doing this 20 years from now. Someday, he will be in a nursing home, and Betty will bring him a Schlotzsky's sandwich with extra mayo.

The other potentially traumatic memory was the hike we didn't take. I researched thoroughly every day of this trip. My goal was to look for hikes of about a mile in length with gentle elevations, mainly so that Eleanor could get her hiking fix in without Betty getting her whining fix in. The Spud Lake hike between Durango and Silverton seemed to fit the bill. I read review after review, everything I could find on line. The consensus was that the road up was a bit rough but easily passable in an SUV/CUV. The blog that swayed me was written by a man who said that, while his wife found it a little bumpy, they had no trouble managing the road in a CR-V, which is lower to the ground than my Santa Fe. To this gentleman I say: You, sir, are a lying liar.

See? Even the road is a lying liar. It starts out all nice and flat, so you're like, meh, just a dirt road! Then the potholes start, and you're like, meh, I can avoid those. And the next thing you know, you're teetering on the edge of a ravine, dodging basketball-sized rocks balanced inside hula-hoop-sized craters, confronting a steep, gravelly incline, and you're like, NOPE! Eleanor, get out and help Mommy make a 27-point turn without causing us to plummet to our deaths!

Old Lime Creek Road would have been a little bumpy in a small tank, although the tank would have fallen immediately off the edge of the steep ravine because the corkscrew road was, at most, one-and-a-half-cars wide. And by "steep ravine," I mean a sheer drop of a few hundred feet or so. I tried not to look, but given that Eleanor and Bruce seemed to want to lean in to the center of the car, I'm thinking it was quite a drop. Perhaps the fact that I couldn't find any online pictures of the road should have been a clue that, maybe, drivers and passengers were so busy clinging to the steering wheel and/or closing their eyes in terror to take photos.

Really, it's a little surprising he was
willing to sit next to her at mealtimes.

Eleanor, always full of the sunny optimism of adolescence, began telling Bruce and Betty about some of the historical information she learned this year in social studies, specifically, about the Donner party. She pointed out that, really, given that we were the only ones on the road and were in the middle of the forest and didn't have cell signals, it was highly likely that if we drove off the edge of the road, we would eventually have to eat each other, and, based on size, she was pretty sure she and I could overpower the two of them and survive.

Fortunately, we did not actually wind up ever finding out which one of us would win "Survivor: Old Lime Creek Road." We successfully turned around and made our way back down, at which point we stopped at a safe pull out at the bottom of the road and were able to properly admire the picturesque ravine that nearly killed us, before starting up the Donner Party jokes again.

If you look very, very closely, way down there
is the tiniest thread of blue from the river water
Eleanor would have used to cook us all into
a tasty stew, had we gone over the edge.

The important thing is, we survived, uneaten. These two memories, like many of our classic road trip mishaps, definitely look a lot funnier in the rear view mirror!