Just got home from renting a UHaul van–how many times in my life have I driven around in one of those orange-and-white truck-monsters, schlepping my furniture from place to place or (all these years later) my daughters’ furniture…
There’s just something about boosting myself way up into the driver’s seat, turning down the air conditioner’s mighty fan (at rental time, they set it to “nuclear blast strength”)…
I release the parking brake–loud, satisfying thunk! Suddenly, I’m younger than springtime and ten feet tall.
The cup holders are new, but I like them. They fit right in. Four cup holders, though the van seats just two people. And each one is wide and deep enough to hold one of those really, really huge drinks that nobody finishes. Milkshakes for giants, coffee for narcoleptics who’ll drive until dawn.
Something about those cup holders has made me nostalgic tonight for the road, for the many cross-continent road trips our family took in the eighties and nineties–gators and craters and dinosaur bones–the Meramec Caverns (Missouri), the world’s largest hand-dug well (middle of Kansas), the Terre Haute Historical Society (Indiana), and “Questions people ask about Harold Warp” (Nebraska)…
Surely I could go all those places right now if I just filled up four cup holders with Dunkin coffee and drove all night….
Walt Whitman would have loved UHaul, and those cup holders.
1 response so far ↓
1 Betsy Devine // Sep 10, 2007 at 9:40 am
Nooooo! I take it back–don’t ever rent from U Haul. The funky old company we loved has changed. See below for a post of my recent experience.
http://betsydevine.com/blog/2007/08/27/u-haul-hell-saturday-august-25-2007/