How the Chevy Van Saved My Life
“I will not go on another vacation with you ever again unless you get a car with airconditioning and enough space for me to breathe. I have suffered enough and refuse to suffer again!” I said to my parents.
The summer before my parents stuffed their Dodge Omni to the brim with camping gear and coolers and every item of clothing that we may need for every possible weather situation and crammed me into a narrow space in the back seat beside the window. It was so narrow I had to push a sleeping bag out of the way to buckle my seat belt. Destination: South Dakota. We were going to see the Badlands and Mount Rushmore.
We lived in Ontario, Canada. That is a 2,148.5 km trip to Mt. Rushmore.
The Dodge Omni was a small hatchback. It looked like this:
We got searched at the US border. Guess the border guard couldn’t wrap his head around the absurdity of the overstuffed hatchback with the miserable teenage girl in the back. It looked wrong. It was wrong. He let us go and told us “good luck.” Maybe I should have cried.
Temperatures hit record highs that year. I was hot. Did I mention the hatchback didn’t have airconditioning? This…
