Everyone has childhood vacation stories. Dads taking too many photos. Mom's obsessively giving handy wipes to each kid after they touched anything. And siblings forever wrangling for ever-precious inches of space on long road trips. They're the stories everyone tells many years later at family reunions, with or without scrapbooks and slide shows, making fun of each other's clothing and antics, often opening old wounds long forgotten or never healed. My story is from a month's long cross-country car trip taken by my family in 197...something. Traveling with my family that long revealed the good, bad and ugly in all of us. We saw much of our country; the interesting and even the strange. We met people. And we drove. We drove a lot. But most of all, we made memories that we'll always remember, for better or worse.