All Eras Road Trip Stories — Motoring Lane

Every family has the trip. The one that gets told at Thanksgiving, retold at weddings, and eventually embroidered into something close to mythology. For the Hargroves of Nashville, Tennessee, that trip was the summer of 1988, when Grandpa Earl decided that three generations of Hargroves — himself and Grandma June, their son Ray and his wife Patty, and Ray's three kids Cody (15), Amber (12), and little Jake (5) — should all pile into Ray's 1988 Ford LTD Country Squire and drive to Myrtle Beach. 'It'll bond us,' Earl said. Ray looked at his father. Patty looked at the car. The car had wood-grain paneling and a bumper sticker that said 'I'd Rather Be Fishing.'

The Country Squire was a full-size station wagon in the truest sense — long enough that parallel parking was a theoretical concept, wide enough that it occupied a lane and a half on the interstate, and powerful enough that it got approximately eleven miles to the gallon going downhill with a tailwind. Earl had packed the rear cargo area with a precision that bordered on engineering: two large suitcases, a cooler containing enough food for a week, a tackle box (just in case), a folding card table, and a lawn chair. Ray had not been consulted on the packing. Ray discovered the lawn chair when he opened the tailgate and it fell on his foot.

Grandma June sat in the front passenger seat with a paper bag of hard candies and a road atlas she'd owned since 1974. She narrated the route continuously from Nashville, providing commentary on every town they passed through, every historical marker, and several things that were not historical markers but that she found interesting anyway. Earl drove at a steady 58 miles per hour regardless of the posted speed limit, which meant they were passed by a man on a riding lawnmower at one point — or so Cody claimed for the next thirty years, with increasing embellishment.

The navigational disagreement began in South Carolina. Earl's 1974 atlas showed a coastal route that June insisted was faster. Ray's newer atlas showed the interstate was faster. They took the coastal route. It was not faster. It was, however, scenic — they drove through three small towns, past a shrimp shack where they stopped for lunch and ate the best fried shrimp any of them had ever tasted, and alongside a stretch of marsh that turned gold in the afternoon light. Jake fell asleep with his face against the window. Amber wrote in her journal. Cody, who had been furious about missing a concert back home, quietly stopped being furious somewhere around Georgetown.

They found the beach at 5:47 PM, two hours later than planned and forty minutes before sunset. Earl parked the Country Squire in a lot two blocks from the water, and all seven Hargroves walked to the beach together — Earl and June holding hands, Ray carrying Jake on his shoulders, Patty and Amber walking ahead, Cody trailing behind with his hands in his pockets. They stood at the water's edge and watched the sun go down over the Atlantic. Nobody said anything for a long time. Then Jake, from Ray's shoulders, said: 'It's really big.' Earl laughed so hard he had to sit down in the sand.

They stayed four days. Earl caught a fish off the pier on day two and made Ray photograph it from six different angles. June found a shell she kept on her windowsill until she passed in 2009. Cody got a sunburn so severe that Patty had to apply aloe vera to his back every four hours, which he complained about and secretly appreciated. Amber filled her journal. Jake ate sand on two separate occasions, both deliberate. The Country Squire made it home to Nashville without complaint, the cooler empty, the tackle box unused, the lawn chair still in the back. Ray never did figure out why Earl packed it. He never asked.