Chapter 1

One



Walkie-Talkie #1: "Dad . . . where are you?"

Walkie-Talkie #2: "We're one minute away. We got caught at the light. You're at that gas station in the middle of the next block, right?"

Walkie-Talkie #1: "Uhhh, yeah but . . . ummm . . . we have a slight problem . . ."

Walkie-Talkie #2: "What problem?"

Walkie-Talkie #1: "Ummm, Margarita didn't swing wide enough around the gas pump and we ran into a concrete thing. It tore out the bottom of the RV. What should I do? Margarita's sitting on the ground crying."

Walkie-Talkie #2: "Holy crap."

Less than a half hour into the adventure of a lifetime and the wheels had already come off. Well, maybe not the wheels, but sizable chunks of the rented Winnebago now lay scattered around a convenience-store gas pump in Mesa, Arizona. Big pieces of splintered fiberglass, twisted strips of jagged metal, and in the middle of it all, sitting on the oily pavement, head buried in her hands, was my sobbing daughter-in-law, Margarita.

It was a distressing, stomach-churning sight. It was also moving. Literally. I was in the driver's seat of a second rented RV, a much bigger rig called the Holiday Rambler, and couldn't stop. The entrance to the gas station was too narrow and I was too rattled. Rolling past the accident site, the troubling scene swept by my eyes like a slow panning shot in the movies. The wounded Winnebago was beached on a concrete gas-pump island with three of my family members walking around it in a daze. It was four-thirty in the afternoon on the second day of February, rush hour in snowbird season. The street was clogged with traffic and the drivers were getting pissed, mostly because of us.

"That means the trip is over, right, Jack?"

It was the voice of my mother, eighty-two years old, with a Ph.D. in pessimism, coming from the back of the Holiday Rambler.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Marge, nobody died."

That was my eighty-seven-year-old father, the patron saint of hope, launching yet another flimsy balloon of encouragement into a howling hurricane wind.

Jack and Marge, the package of opposites, the plus and minus charges still holding enough juice to light each other up after more than sixty years of married life. They were raised in the same New Jersey neighborhood, share Irish roots, and make each other laugh. Other than that, Jack and Marge are polar extremes. My dad expects the world to work the way it should. He bought into this life believing the sales pitch that all people were made to be good but then he tears open the package, rips away the bubble wrap, and finds another con artist ready to take him to the cleaners. And it still shocks him. Every single time.

My mom, on the other hand, would've been looking out the window and checking her watch wondering why the crook was late. By her calculations the per capita number of creeps and jackasses on the planet is the highest in recorded history, and most of them seem to be in possession of my father's address and phone number. To deal with that distressing situation and to cope with all the other kinds of inevitabilities, including but not limited to horrible diseases, fiery highway collisions, plane crashes, killer bees, and Charles Manson--like home invaders, my mother has developed a philosophy that she calls stinkin' thinkin'. By assuming that all of life's encounters will stink, my mother has managed to stay even keeled when in fact things do end up stinking. When they don't stink she's pleasantly...

 

Leonard, a "Today Show" correspondent, hits the road for a month in two RVs with three of his grown children, a daughter-in-law, and his octogenarian parents. They journey from Arizona to Rhode Island with colorful stops in the Louisiana bayous and the Biltmore estate, to mention just a few. The really colorful items, however, are the parents, the garrulous, optimistic father and the vituperative, doomsdaying mother, and Marc Cashman brings each of them to life. He makes Leonard sound like a regular guy and enlivens his parents' worn jokes and family stories. In short, you feel as if you're along for the ride. Have fun. J.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

 

"Mike Leonard is a national treasure and his touching, hilarious, instructive account of a loving road trip with his parents and children should be required reading in every family. I'm sending it to all my children so they can share the laughs and the tears."

 

The Ride of Our Lives by Mike Leonard
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