Fruit Juice - South Park

4: Grapes

Current Day

Much to the surprise of each and every one of the four boys, the seventeen-hour roadtrip went off without a hitch; for the most part. A couple hours in, Cartman and Kenny had agreed to a rough four-four-four-four system for figuring out their driving obligations. Kenny was to drive the first few hours until around the Texan border, where a unanimous vote declared a coinciding stop to the nearest run-down diner for a shitty dinner. A really, shitty dinner. How that place ever passed a health and safety inspection was well beyond Kyle, but he could hardly complain about having a meal, albeit a terrible one, in his stomach; something he was under the impression wouldn't be the norm for the rest of the trip.

It was just past nine-pm when they finally got back on the road, this time with Cartman taking over driving duty. It was no surprise that someone like Kenny knew how to drive manual, but the three boys would be lying if they admitted weren't a little shocked that stick seemed to also come quite natural to Cartman as well. In fact, none of the boys were expecting Cartman to be the first in their group to get his license-, mostly aided by the fact he had a car of his own at the time to practice in and flaunt. Then followed Kenny a few months later, although considering he'd basically been driving straight out of diapers, it was purely for the shiny new license card. Then Kyle a few months after that. Stan was the only remaining group member with yet to get his license, an endeavour he had been procrastinating for almost the last two years. With three perfectly capable friends now, he hardly saw the point, but that sentiment didn't hold quite the same weight to his mother, who's hell-bent on getting that sorted out before his eighteenth later in the year.

The next agreed upon swapover point was to be a little ways before Dallas, in some nameless place closer to the halfway point between the Oklahoma-Texan border and Dallas, to be exact. But it didn't exactly matter where, as this time they were going off of a specific time rather than a specific place. Two-am, was when Kenny had requested Cartman to wake him up, before nestling in with a pillow against the window of the passenger seat in attempt to get some much needed shut-eye before his turn to drive again. As Kenny dozed off, the vehicle's atmosphere had quieted significantly; the musical was turned down to near nill, Stan had packed away his Nintendo DS for the night, and where was previously booming conversations had been replaced by occasional whispers. Stan was the first fall asleep of the remaining three, and Kyle took that as his hint to reel it in for the night as well, not wanting to be stuck in a whisper argument with the guy currently in control of a metal shack going seventy miles an hour.

Two-am had eventually arrived, and like promised, Cartman had pulled over near some redneck tourist town in the middle of nowhere, given Kenny one too many pokes to stay asleep though, and promptly switched seats. Unlike Kenny, Cartman didn't immediately jump into slumber the first change he got, instead opting to just stare ahead, as if he was still in the driver's seat needing to keep an eye out on every inch of the road ahead. Little conversation was shared between the two of them, not wanting to wake the two snoozing boys in the backseat. Kyle had extended his small territory by choosing to place his pillow over the piled up bags sat in the footrest below, giving him a semi-area to partially stretch his legs out as he slept in a position not dissimilar to having legs and arms crossed simultaneously. On the other hand, Stan's pillow had been rested vertically in the crook of the window next to him and the seat behind him, allowing him rest his head and turn into the comfy stretch of plush. Eventually, Cartman did drift off to sleep, proposing the same agreement as earlier to Kenny.

This time, there was a specific location they had intended to change over again at; the Louisana border, which during his drive Kenny had calculated in head to arrive at roughly before seven-am. It was kind of an awkward time, he had thought. It felt slightly too early to wake Stan and Kyle up for a day to find another hopefully less shit dinner to crash and feast a breakfast in. But conversely, once they did swap, there was only a four hour period ahead of them until they reached their new home for the next week. At that point, Kenny wasn't sure if it was worth stopping yet again at some place in central Louisana to eat, or if snacks would suffice until they settle into the airbnb and head somewhere for lunch. Afterall, if everything went as planned, they'd be arriving in Holly Bay just after eleven-pm. The sun had risen just after the clock ticked over to six-am, an environmental signal to the boy in the driver's seat that the last leg of their road would soon be in sight. Sure enough, only an hour and a bit later, Kenny had flown by the Louisiana border and found an appropriate spot to pull over. It was no bombshell to him that Cartman didn't require waking up; out of his peripheral, he could tell Eric had been stirring ever since the sun came up, evidently unable to properly drift back to sleep at the night emerged into day.