Mayhem in the Mojave

Mickey riding in a VW Bug full of kids and a
lawn mover in the front trunk?

Road trips can be a real challenge when taking a bunch of kids. Every year, from the time our kids were young, Mickey and I would head out on couple of road trips with our kids.  

When Mickey was teaching school, we didn't have fancy cars or even a comfortable car for our road trips so we certainly did not travel in style.  Our biggest car back in 1990 was a Subaru Wagon.  We had a backwards facing seat installed in the very back just to get more seatbelts in the car. The worst thing about the backwards seat was that the AC didn't reach that back seat very well.  Can you imagine riding backwards for 10 hours in the blazing hot family wagon?  Talk about car sick.

Each summer we'd take a road trip down to Newport Beach.  Our kid's loved the annual beach trip but not a year went by without a mishap. The Mojave desert seems to be the point when things would start to go awry. Perhaps it's because it's the longest stretch of road without gas stations, food and stopping points when traveling from Salt Lake City, Utah to Newport Beach, California.  Maybe the problem is that we were traveling with sundry kids and their schnife.

One of our road trips.  You can only
see 7 of the 8 kids in this car.

During the summer of 1990 we took our annual trip to the beach. We purchased a canvas carrier to put on the roof of the car, loaded 6 kids and 2 adults into our Subaru wagon and off we went.  When we got about an hour out of Las Vegas into the Mojave desert one of our tires blew.  The temps were hovering in the 110's. 

Of course the tire is going to blow. The whole inside of that car was crammed with 6 kids and 2 adults and the outside was stuffed with luggage and things we "needed" for the beach.  Anyway, the best and most important thing that I did when we pulled over to stop and fix the tire, was jump out of the car and start videoing our mayhem.  

The first thing Mickey, Mr Johnny on the spot, decided to do is unload all of the kids into the 115 degree desert.  I asked him nicely why he felt this was necessary in order to change the tire.  He said, "That's where the spare tire and jack are."  I told him that I was positive that there weren't any compartments back there holding a spare tire and jack.  Mickey decided to unload the car anyway.

When he opened the back hatch, the inside of the car immediately heated up to 120 degrees.  Better than that, there was not a spare to be found in the back so unloading all the kids just made everyone very cranky. 

I put all of the kids back into the hot car because it was safer for them in the 120 degree car than it was having them running around in the desert with rattle snakes or playing by the highway with cars and trucks speeding by at 80 mph. Of course we rolled the windows down for their comfort, passed around the water and hoped that Mickey could find the spare and change the tire fairly quickly.  

I suggested that the tire could possibly be under the hood by the engine since I had seen a spare tire under the hood in other cars.  Reluctantly, Mickey opened up the hood and sure enough the tire was right there by the engine. The engine was nice and heated up to about 1000 degrees.  I'm not sure what went through Mickey's mind at that moment but I can safely say that the one thing that didn't cross his mind was that the tire could possibly be a tich hot.

This whole incident is recorded and here it is.  Please notice that the best part of the video is  repeated a second time for your enjoyment and it's in slow motion.  Watch what Mickey does with the tire and his hands after he takes the spare tire out from under the hood.  It's just special.  You will also notice that Mickey finishes his tire changing by giving me a muscle show.  Lucky me!

The next video is of another one of our trips to Newport Beach.  Once again we are in the Mojave desert.  This time we have 8 kids instead of 6.  We are in a Suburban with 10 people. The boys had to ride in the very back because they smelled worse than the girls when in cramped places.  The girls sat on the middle seat and Mickey and I wised up and sat in captains chairs in the front.  Now to make things a bit more dicey, I had ruptured my achilles and had just had surgery, therefore, I was sporting a cast that went up to my hip.  My cast didn't fit well behind the seat so I had to prop it up on the dash board for the ride. Not a comfortable ride especially when I spent the entire trip turning around while doing the splits so I could hand out snacks and gather garbage while refereeing the fights for 10 hours.  Mickey, on the other hand, drove with his hands at 10:00 and 2:00 and pretended to not hear or smell anything that was going on. 

Our Suburban was loaded for bear as we headed for the beach.  We now had a bike rack on the back with TWO canvas luggage racks on the top but when Mickey packed up the two canvas carriers before we left, he didn't zip one of them all the way around. Whilst we were headed down the highway, the wind blew the canvas pack open.  By the time we realized what was happening, all of our duffle bags and beach junk was being scattered across I15 in the middle of the Mojave desert.  Once again we pulled over and watched our stuff get run over by other travelers driving busses, trucks and cars who managed to zip their bags shut.  

I usually double check Mickey's packing and zipping skills but since I was on crutches I couldn't climb a ladder to check the roof top bags. 

You will notice in this video that our oldest kids are teens and that they are running around in the desert, next to the very busy highway, trying to gather all of our items that blew out of the carrier.  The bags and clothes that we did find were either ripped or had tread marks on them.  We even lost a nebulizer machine that my youngest son needed for his asthma. (He could hold his breath for this trip).  Of course I managed to video the whole thing.  I was no help anyway since I was sitting in the car with my casted leg up on the dash. As I sat and watched the kids darting around the desert and highway, gathering clothes, I just thought "safety first" so I made the younger kids stay in the vehicle. Once again it was very hot in the desert.

I'm glad we took all of our road trips with the kids but it's kind of nice to take a road trip where you don't have to unload 8 kids to change a flat tire or put your bags on top of your car just so you can fit inside of it.

  

The beach trip where our
bags blew all over the
highway and we lost half
of our stuff.

Chillin' on the beach with the only clothes we could find.