We weren’t supposed to get lost.
For the first six days, everything went exactly to script. We saw the Petrified Forest (Dad took 200 photos of rocks). We ate at a diner where the waitress called us “hon.” We sang “Sweet Caroline” so many times that Sam threatened to jump out of the moving vehicle.
I was seventeen. I wanted to get lost. I wanted static on the radio and a boy in the backseat who wasn’t my little brother. But you don’t say that to a man who cried when they discontinued his favorite brand of canned chili. blog amateur
I didn’t have a compass. I didn’t have a GPS signal. All I had was a sunburn and a stupid sense of direction. But I pointed left, and he turned.
He smiled. I’d never seen him smile without a reason before. It changed his whole face. We weren’t supposed to get lost
“It’s a dirt road,” Dad argued. “We have a sedan.”
And I learned that sometimes, the only way to find the thing you weren’t looking for is to run out of instructions. We ate at a diner where the waitress called us “hon
But Dad looked at the map. Then at the road. Then at the gas gauge. For the first time in his entire life, he said something I didn’t expect.