Road Trip Laughs

We're enroute now between Sun Valley and Grand Rapids. It's been a good road trip so far. The Comfort Inns are comforting, and fighting in the back seat has been minimal, with no serious injuries incurred. But it sure is taking us a while to get all the way across this broad, capacious, enormous, extensive, gigantic, huge, immense, mammoth, massive, monumental, prodigious, spacious, spread-out, sweeping, tremendous, voluminous, whopping, widespread country. (Did I mention it's really big?)

In the car, we keep ourselves occupied with Books on Tape. We've listened to Kenneth Branaugh narrating C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew and made our way through an abridged version of Seabiscuit yesterday. We've also listened to lots of Garrison Keillor. In one story, he relates that when he was in fifth grade, he wanted to be a comedian. It didn't take much to make kids laugh at that age. All it took, he said, was one word, properly contextualized: Booger. The proper context? English literature.

Lord of the Boogers. Anne of Green Boogers. The Adventures of Huckleberry Booger. Ten Thousand Boogers Under the Sea. Turns out Garrison was right. (Of course, those of us who are Dave Barry fans know this already.) I nearly had to pull over when as a family we decided that the book we were most looking forward to reading this summer was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Booger.

We'll be home tonight! Hooray!