For most families, a four-hour trip lasts four hours.
Maybe five if you stop and eat once. Maybe six if you aren’t in a hurry and stop to go shopping. Perhaps seven if you pull over at every roadside joint selling fireworks or peaches or boiled peanuts or ice cold wine.
And, it could even take eight hours if you are riding bicycles.
Our family is different. It takes us four hours just to get out of our driveway.
I’m being facetious, of course. It doesn’t actually take us four hours to get out of the driveway. It only takes one hour.
A while back, our family took a four-hour journey by most ordinary measures. But we have to consider other factors when determining how long a trip with the Robbins family will take.
The chief one being: How long it will take us to make it out of the city limits of Homerville, Georgia.
We’ll have everyone loaded up, every seatbelt buckled, every door locked in the house and the alarm on. Then it starts.
A phone call. “Oh, I have to go down to the office and sign some checks before I leave,” I’ll say. “It’ll only be 10 minutes.”
On our latest attempt to leave town, it was my wife’s turn. Nothing you can really do about that. Sometimes, things come up suddenly and you have to take are of them.
Other times, well, not so much. Just as I’m about to turn right out of our driveway, within spitting distance of the city limits, my wife will say, “Oh, we need to go by Margaret’s house. I have to drop off a casserole for her.”
Or “Oh, we have to go by Walgreens first to pick up a prescription.” Or “We have to stop by the bank and make a deposit before we leave.”
Or “Aunt Lucy is in the hospital and I promised her we’d visit before we left town.” Or “There’s a three-act musical performance I bought tickets for that we have to attend before we go to the beach.”
I’m being facetious, of course. It was only a one- act play.
It’s hard enough for me to drive and practice Christian patience with everyone in the car critiquing my driving and engaging in distracting conversation. Not getting there in a hurry only rattles my nerves further.
Maybe I’m the only human being like this, but I like to get there. I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to eat. Don’t really have any interest in bathroom breaks. I just want to get there as fast as I can without getting arrested.
Then, I can relax. Then, I can enjoy myself. It’s the same if I’m going on vacation, going to work, going to a Georgia football game. I want to get there, and I’m tense until I do.
Going home, not so much. “Can we stop at Cracker Barrel and meander around their gift shop for a couple of hours?” Sure, honey.
“Would you like to spend another night?” Okay by me, if you’re paying.
“Can we take a detour and see that Grand Canyon I’ve heard so much about?” Not a problem, dear.
I’m being facetious, of course. I would never stop to shop at Cracker Barrel.
The official time toll for our latest family trip: 11 hours for what should have been a seven-hour jaunt from New Orleans to South Georgia.
Nearly an hour to get out of New Orleans, another hour in a traffic jam just out of town, 45 minutes to eat, over six hours of driving, and over an hour at Trader Joe’s in Tallahassee.
Oh, and another hour because our driver tried a short cut – unsuccessfully.
To protect his guilt, I won’t reveal his identity.
• Len Robbins is the editor of The Clinch County News. He can be reached at lrobbins@clinchcounty news
