the drive across america road trip festival

by Robert John Miller

Exactly one month after my 16th birthday, as a treat, I was honored to drive the family RV as our addition to the Drive Across America Road Trip Festival. It helped that Dad was still in prison and Mom was rum-drunk and I had just officially passed driver’s ed, but it was still an honor.

The way the Tri-County Region’s Drive Across America Road Trip Festival worked is that we all decorated wherever we lived like somewhere else and posted the listing on AirBnB. So Sidney Leigh Anne would borrow a stuffed alligator to sit outside her tent out in the woods and list it as a Down on the Bayou Experience, or Jared Watkins over at the quarry would push some boulders around and post a sign that read, “Welcome to the Grand Canyon.”

We would all drive around for two full days, a full weekend, just all over the Tri-County Region, so we would be exhausted when we finally made it to our destinations. Everyone was so excited to get where they were going fast that we’d all speed and run red lights, so in some sense it was a fundraiser for the county sheriffs, who set up speed traps every other mile. The hospitals did pretty well too.

I was still a pretty new and cautious driver then so I spent the first three hours in a roundabout, which Mom didn’t notice on account of the alcohol. “I think I may have overserved myself,” she’d say as I changed lanes, her spilling her drink and me trying not to drive the RV into any of the other festivalgoers, equally hurried to arrive.

That year, after one long night in the RV, we just went back home. “Thank goodness,” Mom said. “I was already starting to get homesick.”

Photo of Robert John Miller

BIO: Robert John Miller's work has appeared in places like Bending Genres, HAD, Maudlin House, Scaffold and elsewhere, available at robertjohnmiller.com.