Road To PAX South 2019 - Day 1

All things considered, we made shockingly good time today. I’d wanted to leave at 0900, but final load checks never go perfectly smoothly, and saying goodbye to four kids and a very patient wife is never a short process. There are always tears. Some them aren’t mine. All this meant that we didn’t actually depart the family domicile until 0930, point the nose of the family people hauler South down Interstate 29, and come up to cruising speed.

The Aarons are off on an adventure!

 It was really surprising to see the snow quantities increase as we passed into Missouri and even Kansas. We seemed to be driving into a weather system, and hit some pretty good fog in Kansas. Enough to make me slow down a bit. Mini-me turns out to be a lousy navigator. I could barely get him to ride shotgun at all, he was too busy playing videogames and watching movies in the back seat. Maybe that makes him a good RIO, always watching screens? I don’t know, that’s for someone more knowledgeable than me about such matters to say.

The plan had been to just get to Oklahoma City and call it a night, but we hit OKC before 2000 and I was feeling good, so we kept going. That might have been a mistake. Traffic wasn’t bad, but I’m not sure that navigating through the Dallas freeway system in the dark, while tired, and searching for a hotel is a thing I want to repeat again. At the very least, I know it’s feasible when I make this run again next year!

All that leaves for tomorrow is a relatively short jaunt down to San Antonio, with the vital first In-N-Out stop and some Cane’s Chicken!

Road Trips Old and New

The first family road trip that I can remember was in 1984. My parents loaded my brother and me up into an old truck with a camper shell on the back, and we went to Yellowstone. That was the first, and thus far, only time I’ve ever been to that park. I don’t have a lot of memories of that trip, since I was only four at the time, just a few vague recollections of riding in the camper top, sitting in a mechanic’s office when the truck broke down, and maybe a couple of other random fragments. Like I said, I was four.

Over the years, we took a lot more road trips. Never again in that truck, but my parents bought a first-generation Ford Aerostar minivan and towed a twenty-foot Komfort trailer to the Grand Canyon, Pismo Beach, and a variety of other places until 1993. Then they traded the Aerostar for a full-sized Econoline E150, and we went to Alaska. After that trip, the Komfort got traded for a bigger trailer which would be more capable of dealing with a bunch of hungry teenage boys. The family road trip was an annual highlight that only ended for me when the van dropped me off at college in 1997.

I haven’t made nearly as many road trips as an adult, though there have been a few. I love them, there have just been job issues. The last one I took was in 2015, navigating my heavily loaded Saturn Vue from Seattle to Sioux Falls in the big family move. That wasn’t an especially fun trip. I was alone, I had a deadline, and my car was so filled with stuff that I could barely see out the passenger side windows.

My one photo stop, somewhere in Montana, on the way to South Dakota.

But now things are changing. Like I said in yesterday’s vlog, this week I’m off to PAX South, and for the very first time, I’ve got a buddy with me. I’d promised the kids for years that they could start coming with me to PAX when they were thirteen. Why thirteen? Because that’s the age when the convention lets them do their own thing, and not require they have an adult present at all times.

I’m excited. It’s a chance to introduce my favorite convention to Mini-me. It is, I hope, the start of a running tradition that will see a growing crew attend a PAX event every year for a good long time. For this year, it should also be the start of some more meaningful road trips. We’ve got a long way to go, and a short time to get there (as the song says) but there should be time for a few short stops along the way. Mini-Me has never been to Texas before. I’ve never been through Austin, or spent any amount of time in Dallas. I’m looking forward to an exciting trip.

SUX It Does Not

Over on airlinereporter.com, my most recent AvGeek road trip story is up. The Sioux City Airport has kind of an undeserved reputation, and a really good local museum!

You can check out the full story, with a lot more pretty airplane pictures, over at AirlineReporter.com