Road trips are awesome! However, things occasionally go wrong, even for road trip veterans.
Pack your patience
Hitting the open road requires that you be inside a moving vehicle with family/friends for extended periods of time. This alone can be enough to make a lot of people question their composure. Throw in a small inconvenience and well, let’s just say you will quickly know who has the patience in the group.
It’s inevitable that some small catastrophe will happen to test your patience during a road trip. We had once such incident happen during our recent epic roadway adventure.
A word of advice
As you know, we are all about the budget around here. Again – broke teachers.
We had run into a dollar store to purchase snacks. Jeff saw a stack of mini styrofoam coolers. We both immediately thought it would b e a great way to keep some drinks cool in the car while driving in the heat of the U.S. southwest. And, bonus, they were cheap enough to be disposable before our flight home.
Things were going great…until we opened the trunk a few hours later. We stopped for gas and noticed a wet spot in the trunk. We thought there might have been a few ice cubes that had escaped and melted. So, we closed the trunk and continued our adventure.
We stopped again a few hours later to grab lunch and popped the trunk to get a drink. The wet spot had grown into a small puddle.
After checking into our hotel later that night, we went back to the car to get our bags from the trunk. The puddle had turned into a sopping wet trunk. We quickly realized the coolers were no longer holding any ice or water. It had all seeped through the walls of the coolers.
Make the best of the situation
Remember the patience we told you to pack? Well, that mantra of ours came in handy.
We didn’t get frustrated. After all, we were on the adventure of a lifetime.
Nothing was ruined. It was only water.
We wiped off our bags (the joys of hard-sided luggage) and kept going about our business.
Why are we telling you this?
We’re sharing this story for two reasons. First, we think you should know that things like this happen to everyone. And, second, because we just want to remind you to pack your patience on your next adventure.
Oh, and buy better quality coolers for your roadtrip.
Want to know more about how we hit the open road? Check out our YouTube video 15 Things You Need to Know Before Going on a Roadtrip or read our post Things You Need to Know Before Going on a Roadtrip.
And remember, break the monotony, not the bank.
–Marnie and Jeff
