I'm dying 🤣

A Dad Summer Road Trip Manifesto: Fact: 100% of dads behind the wheel on a road trip are out to beat every other rival dad on the road… and every other dad who made the same road trip in history. We measure ourselves by following these 12 or so criteria and if a dad doesn’t admit most of these he’s lying: To begin, we engineer a flawlessly packed car the Tetris creators would envy... We’ll say, “look at this, it’s goddamned perfect” as you ignore our Mona Lisa in the trunk… We may even take a photo to send to other dads to make them jealous. Once on the road, our mission is speed and speeding without getting caught speeding. We slide lanes. We draft near trucks. We slip behind super speeders letting them take the risk while we safely become the second-fastest car on the road (we think)… On this, we mentally keep track of every car on the highway and if they pass us, it is our life’s mission to pass them back… In addition, we keep an ongoing list of kindred road spirits… dudes behind the wheel of other cars who seem to have our same philosophy… When we find these guys, we become a secret, unspoken pack on the road… like a peloton in the Tour de France… Linking up, passing slow cars together… It’s a thing of beauty and no dad ever meets the other dad and we never even see each other’s faces but it’s a perfect dad/friend relationship. And all dads have one simple, overriding philosophy that trumps all others: We don’t want to stop. Ever. Now, we know we HAVE to stop at some point (or a lot of points), but we never want to. If we have to stop, we keep a running tally in our heads of the number of cars that passed us and the time we’ve lost by stopping. Every minute you can’t decide on whether to get the burger or nuggets ticks off another dozen or so cars in our heads and it’s painful. All we’re thinking is , ‘just pick something so we can get back on the road.’ In fact, we likely will actually say the words: “Just pick something so we can get back on the road.” You, our family, will ignore us and take forever. Again, we’ll say, “you’re taking forever.” Any road trip under 2 hours shouldn’t require any stops. Dads will say “everybody use the bathroom before we leave” many times to hammer this point home… But none of the family members will listen and we’ll have to stop… Rides exceeding 4 hours will require one stop for sure, but we’ll try like hell to keep it to one… And we will fail because you’ll all drink too much from whatever soda or juice or Gatorade you bought at stop #1. If you have to pee, we will pull over as soon as we can because we’re not monsters. We may ask “how bad do you have to go?” but we’ll stop soon. Or soon-ish. Or eventually. If we have to pee, we will hold it in as long as we can so that when you say you have to pee, we will say, “since we’re stopping I guess I’ll go” even though we had to go so bad we could taste the urine on the back of our throats… Yeah, that’s how bad we want to make time and don’t want to be the reason for slowing down. If we hit traffic, it is 100% because we should have left earlier. If it rains, everyone else “needs to learn to drive in the rain” or they’re “morons who can’t drive when the roads are wet.” If we’re making good time, we’ll mention it once or twice by saying “we’re moving” If we’re making excellent time, we won’t say a damn thing because we don’t want to jinx it – like not talking to a pitcher in the middle of a no hitter. We know you, our family, care about none of these things. You just want to listen to your music or play your Switch or nap… But road trips are our art… And on every one, we want to paint our masterpiece. If you’re a dad and you’re nodding your head, share this with other dads and follow me @Jon_Finkel for more columns like this. (And be sure to sign up for my free Books & Biceps newsletter in my bio).