South of the Border.

When I was little, my family would take lots of vacations. Road trips, mostly. We flew to Disney World and Florida a couple of times, but our tradition was to pile into a car and drive for hours to visit family friends along the east coast.

I loved it. I loved being tuna-canned into a car with the people I liked most. I loved driving everyone insane. I was hyper as a child-- and not your run-of-the-mill-every-kid-is-hyperactive hyper. I had ADHD. My body generated more energy than a nuclear power plant. By the end of most of these trips, everyone in the car would hate me. I was that annoying.

One summer, we decided to take advantage of my mom's friend's cousin's timeshare. Anything to save a buck or two. So my little makeshift family, made up of my me and my best friend and my Mom and her best friend and her best friend's daughter and her best friend's daughter's best friend, piled into our minivan and went on our way.

I don't remember how long the trip was. All I remember iss that I was endlessly distracted. My mom brought toys, books, videogames, and even a T.V./VCR that we plugged into the car and played movies on. A couple of times, we played the quiet game. But that never lasted long. I sucked at the quiet game.
 
When we finally arrived at the border between North and South Carolina, my friend and I, being video game fanatics, begged my mom to go to an arcade that we had found. There was a giraffe statue outside of it. It looked awesome.

When we got inside, though, we found out that this was where games went to die. More than half of them were out of service. The rest were either missing pieces, broken, or lame. There was a game that had a giant, smiling clown face with comically (or terrifyingly, depending on how you feel about clowns) large teeth that you had to hit with little foam balls to get points. Except half the teeth were missing. This clown's mouth looked like piano keys. I think he had more teeth missing than actually there.