Reviewed: Chevy Aveo, roadtripping

“Jail or Canada. Both of them suck.” -Max, Across the Universe

You’d think with all my neuroses and travel anxiety I would be a terrible candidate for a roadtrip, but there’s where you would be wrong because I actually LOVE being on the road. Now all I need is my own car.

We started our roadtrip with a backbreaking trek to the Jersey City Dollar Rent-a-Car, carrying our bags down into the subway, up three flights of stairs to W 4th St., four blocks to the PATH, down the stairs, up the stairs, through the Jersey City mall, across the mall parking lot and finally into the sweating hot office of Dollar, where a lady with super long fingernails took an hour to type our info into the computer. Even though we were trying to be badasses and deny it, our bags were heavy. Plus, I had packed a whole mess of CD’s for the road, which was awesome when I found out our economy Aveo didn’t have a CD player, tape player or even electric windows. Do you know how many tolls are in New Jersey? Welcome to handcrank city.

The Aveo is an okay car, I guess. I’ve never really known anyone who drove a Chevy except for my sister’s boyfriend back in high school and his was blue. I always thought of him as driving fast, but maybe it was just his driving pose, because in this Chevy even though it hit 80 with the rest of cars on the road I didn’t go above that because every time I did the car started making a weird sound and we thought we might crash. It was severely lacking in the comfort department and Murph kept stealing my arm rest to get close to me (in her defense, it does seem lame that only the driver gets an arm rest.)

There’s two kinds of roadtrips—really fast and just dicking around. I only like the really fast kind when it starts to become a kind of dangerous game—like how fast can I go without killing us all, and dammit, no we aren’t stopping so you can go to the bathroom. But mostly, I like the slow, dicking around kind because you get to do great stuff like stop in Scranton and go to the Steamtown Mall, or play every single fun crane machine you find at travel plazas (Fun Crane 8, Us 3). On the way home we tried to make time and cut our drive down a couple hours, but then we saw this pirate ship next to the road
and it was about the coolest thing we saw in Canada, besides hockey of course.

Chevy Aveo: 41 stars, roadtrip: 99 stars, Canada: 30 stars.

To be continued with…hockey, Steamtown Mall, giant fun crane, border agents, etc.