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Most people hate family trips. The long, boring car rides...the disgusting rest stops...the parents singing to borderline-neolithic oldies
(or is that just mine?)...the list goes on and on. But when your friend (and calling Laura my friend is something
like calling Michael Jackson weird--it doesn't begin to tell the story) is with you, suddenly things aren't
so unbearable. The boredom gives way to outbursts of singing all eight verses of "Clementine" in an interesting (read:dischordant)
way, keeping tally of how many times certain parties (read:me) have to use the disgusting rest stops, and wondering why Mt.
Rainier appears to be following you (read:because we don't quite grasp the relationship between stationary things, such as
mountains, and moving things, such as Volvos). Laura has been on every vacation with my family since we met on the bus on
the first day of 7th grade, so she and I are experts on things like...
- Wearing wedge heels when sightseeing in San Francisco
- Sitting by the door of a drafty California diner on one of the unmentioned-in-tourist-books rainy days on the way to San
Francisco
- Getting lost in hotel parking lots and finally coming out through an exit door, only to find yourself next to a guy with
flashing red and blue colorchange earrings
- Sharing hotel rooms in Grayland that appear to be tilted, due to the angles of the stove and fridge, which are next to
each other
- Walking distances rivaling the Navajo Long Walk in order to find the Exploratorium, due to Dad's ignorance of the three
most dreaded words on a map--"Not To Scale"
- Sleeping on box springs because the hotel shortchanged us a bed and didn't have any rollaways
- Sharing a rollaway approximately the size of postage stamp because a different hotel had shortchanged us
a bed
- Alleging that the wall beside the aforementioned postage stamp bed on wheels "smelled funny"
- Mysteriously developing foot hemorrhages after dinner in a nice restaurant
- Watching Dad's barbecue chicken fly off his plate and viciously attack his green shirt, causing him to walk around all
day looking suspiciously like a sniper victim from the set of CSI
- Falling down Telegraph Hill while "bok"ing "Oh Susannah." "Bok" is the sound a chicken makes, by the way
- Having long-standing jokes about "something on your shirt"
In other words, Laura was right when she said, "I'm like clean underwear! You can't go on a trip without me!"
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