28 Follow Your Nose

Chapter 28 FOLLOW YOUR NOSE The rain was still coming down hard as Dr. McDonald pulled the RV onto I-565 out of Huntsville, Alabama, heading west. He could barely see through the windshield and almost missed the exit to turn onto Route 24. For the sake of safety, both parents agreed that it would be best to stop for the night as soon as possible. It took awhile to reach it, but they finally pulled into Slickrock, a campground in Russellville, Alabama. By dawn, the sky had cleared and they got back on the road early. Soon they were on I22, when they saw this....

WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI Birthplace of America's Music "Woo-hoo," hollered Coke. "The Magnolia State!" "Umm, can you smell the honeysuckle yet?" asked Mrs. McDonald. "No, but I'm starting to smell the holding tank," her husband replied. "Coke, it's time you did a dump." "Okay, okay, Dad." "What are we going to do in Mississippi?" Pep asked. "Can we go to Yazoo City?" asked Coke. "What's in Yazoo City?" asked his father. "I don't know," Coke said. "I just like saying Yazoo City."

Mrs. McDonald opened her Road Guide to Mississippi and started leafing through it. "Let's see," she said. "Root beer was invented in Biloxi … Greenville is the towboat capital of the world … the International Checkers Hall of Fame is in Petal …" "Oh, that sounds real interesting," Coke said, stifling a yawn. "… the world's largest shrimp is on display in Pascagoula," Mrs. McDonald continued. "And oooh, look! The man who invented the dollar sign is buried near Pinckneyville!" Dr. McDonald was getting increasingly irritated. With every offbeat destination his wife suggested, he would roll his eyes, shake his head, and let out a groan. "The world's largest cedar bucket is in Oxford," Mrs. McDonald continued, "and in 1884, at a shoe store in Vicksburg, a man named Phil Gilbert came up with the idea of selling left and right shoes together in the same box!" (Note to the reader: This stuff is true. I

didn't make any of it up. Go ahead and Google it if you don't believe me.) "How did they sell shoes before that?" Pep asked. "One at a time, I guess," said Mrs. McDonald. "Who would buy one shoe?" asked Coke. "A one-legged man?" At that point, Dr. McDonald reached the point of exasperation. He grabbed the Road Guide to Mississippi out of his wife's hand. "Tell you what," he said. "Forget about the stupid guidebook." And with that, he threw Road Guide to Mississippi out the window. "Ben!" "Dad!" "Our lives are too planned out," Dr. McDonald said. "That's what's wrong with the world today. We need a guidebook for everything. Why go anywhere anymore? You can just read about places in a guidebook or

watch a video. Let's be spontaneous for a change. Let's just wing it!" "I can't believe you did that, Ben!" shouted Mrs. McDonald. "I would never throw your things out the window." "I can't take it anymore!" Dr. McDonald hollered, taking his hands off the steering wheel for a moment. "Who cares about root beer and checkers and how shoes used to be sold? I say we head west and follow our noses. That's what the pioneers did when they settled this country. They didn't have guidebooks. They relied on their instincts." In the back, Coke and Pep rushed to grab their cell phones so they could text each other. Coke: That was AWESOME! Pep: Dad is going mental She may have been right. Dr. McDonald was not known for his spontaneity. He was a planner, a list maker, a scheduler, an

alphabetizer. But the family had been riding around in the little RV for more than two weeks now. If you take laboratory rats and confine them in an enclosed space for a long period of time, they start acting strange. They become aggressive; they fight and engage in other antisocial behaviors. People are no different. For the next few minutes, the RV was filled with the unpleasant sound of angry silence. The twins were afraid to say anything. Mrs. McDonald was fuming. Her husband had never been a mean man, and it wasn't like him to act so impulsively. She felt lost without a guidebook, just like he felt lost without his GPS. "I'm going to stop at the first decent-size town we come to," Dr. McDonald said, hoping to break the silence. "We'll get out and explore. You never know what you might find." But there were no towns in sight—just a lot of nothing out the window on I-22. It wasn't until they had driven almost thirty miles that a