On the whole I like road trips. Well, with the wrong company they are about the worst thing in the world, but with the right company I really like them. So, more out a spirit of contrariness than any devotion to accuracy, the persona of my inner crank offers, in retort to S L Kim, ten things to hate about road trips.

1) The food. Sure, it’s possible to pack healthy, nutritious food and keep it well enough preserved for it still to be good as you eat in the car five hours later, but how often does that really happen? Many muster a bottle of water and a box of crackers, but few are those who make a trip of any duration without eating something they would never eat in their everyday lives. Since crappy fast food is the food of my people, I sort-of enjoy being forced to eat it, but that lasts no more than a few hours, maybe a few bites.

2) The thing I forgot. I don’t know what it is or I wouldn’t have forgotten it, but I will remember it when I need it and it isn’t there. This isn’t unique to road trips, but the expectations are different since, after all, you can just throw things in the car: the sweater, the extra batteries, the late birthday present, the myrrh . . . when I travel by air I feel entitled to leave those things behind because I just couldn’t get them in my bag (singular).

3) Interstate restrooms. Need I say more? I imagine that the women’s rooms aren’t a treat either, but there are few things like a highway men’s room on a hot summer day to make one wonder about the basic life skills of the people who are driving all those . . .

4) Minivans. In cities SUVS are the main menace 2 society, but on the open road beware the minivan. They drift. They wobble. They drive too slowly, unless you pass them, in which case you trigger a testosterone high that drives them into a furious wobbling charge.

5) Fast and slow. Back when he was funny George Carlin observed –he was an observational comic—that when you are driving, everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, everyone driving faster is an asshole. Amen. I didn’t say “ten things I reasonably hate about road trips.”

6) Everything on the radio starting five minutes into the second hour of listening. As with the food, I approach this with good humor at the start. Hey, Johnny Paycheck. Oh my god, the Scorpions! So, that’s what Jessica Simpson sounds like. Now I know. Hey, mariachi music . . .

Two corollaries: a) the 15 minutes of denial I spend listening to NPR as it fades into white noise & b) every advertisement in the history of radio.

7) Bad signage. This doesn’t really affect me that often since I’m pretty good about planning ahead and bringing a map, but since I figure that by the time a sign goes up on the side of an interstate road it has had to pass certain engineering requirements for materials, been tested for legibility, its placement debated, etc. Or not, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t the product of guys with giant sketch pads and croquet wickets on the back of a pick-up truck writing as quickly as they can, tossing the things overboard, and hoping for the best. So, when a crucial sign is half-concealed by the only tree within miles, or says that something is at the “next right” when in fact it is the third right, or when the off-ramp for an east-west road gives me a choice between heading “north” or “south,” it offends my inner fascist.

8) Car accidents. Obviously being in one is terrible, but this doesn’t happen to most people with any regularity. What I mean is seeing the aftermath of car accidents, which you really can’t avoid seeing if you travel much more than, say, four hours. Other forms of travel can induce anxiety or a sudden awareness of what delicate little meat puppets we are when high speeds and steel are involved, but I’ve never been in plane that has flown by a plane wreck. Car travel is the only form of transportation in which you routinely witness some version of the worst-case-scenario fate for the vehicle type in question (except for walking).

9) Driving in my sleep. Like video game-playing, house-painting, or running through conjugations, driving is something that, if I do it all day, my mind can’t stop doing as I try to go to sleep. The difference is that I’m seldom risking my life if I fall asleep while conjugating verbs, but if I fall asleep when I (think I) should be driving, I jolt awake as if I were about to fall out of the tree.

10) The wastelands. On a trip of any duration you get to see a lot of interesting things, great architecture, natural beauty, an accidental monument, but you also get to see the wake and scars of America’s all-but unbridled capitalism: ghettoes, ghost towns, and butt-ugly office parks where farmland was a year ago. One can see any or all of these things on a daily basis, of course, but the movement of the road trip puts them into a different context, juxtaposing the socio-economically quick and dead in a montage cut to the soundtrack of Johnny Paycheck, the Scorpions, Jessica Simpson, mariachi music, and the fading crackle of Marketplace report that passeth understanding . . .