Some of my fondest... and WORST memories of Mike came from the times in which the entire family would pack into the car, truck, or airplane for a trip across states. My dad used to say that we were just like the Griswolds from National Lampoon's Vacation--he was Clark, Mom was Helen, I was Audrey and Mike was Rusty... the last of which made me snicker, because after all, it WAS Rusty who 'stabbed his brain.'

Car trips were the most fun, but also most dreaded experience. according to my parents, one of our first long trips across country--moving to Colorado--consisted of a lot of chocolate smeared seats and goldfish bowls wrapped with plastic wrap on the floor of the car. Of course, as time passed, Mike and I finally figured out that the trip would be more fun and interesting if we picked on each other mercilessly until one or the other cried out of frustration ("Mom, he's staring at me! She pinched me!"). These little "games" would finally escalate to the point where our parents threatened to drop one, the other, or both of us off on the side of the road (something that I now know would never have occurred, but which seemed like a valid threat at the time--especially considering the time that my dad left Mike in a 7-Eleven, but that's another story that I'll expand on elsewhere).

These little goofball antics evolved as we got older, and seemed to finally come to a head during our final family car trip to California in 1996. Aside from Mike picking his nose in the seat next to me (or so I said--of course Mike would insist that he was just SCRATCHING the side of his nose. At least, we didn't crash the car while the event was taking place, sparing Mike poor Rusty Griswold's fate), the "torture play" remained civilized, mostly because there was little room in the car to work with. We'd loaded up the 5-seater sedan to the max--myself, Dad, Barb, Kyle (my husband to be at the time), and Mike.

As Barb's poor little Toyota Camry puttered headlong toward California, its male occupants contented themselves (some of them, at least) with bashing each other with cans of Cheez Whiz, making rude sounds, and pretty much annoying the hell out of the female occupants.

After twenty-some odd hours of being smashed into one seat with Kyle while Mike constantly scooted toward us, trying to get out of the hot sun filtering in through the window (when we asked him to move, he'd bellow "I'M ROOOOAAAASTTING!", which has since become sort of a family joke), we finally arrived in California... tired, bedraggled, and semi-crazy. And to think that we had to go all the way back. The car was starting to look less and less like a poor little Camry, and more like a four-door torture machine.