I like @zenvelo‘s answer – a lot.
A story:
In my first construction job, when I was in northern central North Carolina, another young engineer came to our job from where he had been working in Georgetown, South Carolina. (Just south of Myrtle Beach.) He had made a friend while there, another young guy our age, who was still at the Georgetown project, but lonely now that his friend had left. He had a company-paid condo on Pawley’s Island, a resort community adjacent to Myrtle Beach. So, that sets the stage. He had left a standing invitation to his old friend to “c’mon down any weekend”, and the invitation extended to friends, so … I was invited. That first trip was memorable for its badness.
Myrtle Beach is about 250 miles from Eden, NC, so at the best case scenario it was going to take us five hours in light traffic (in my new friend’s car) on Friday night to get there. But we were psyched, so we went ahead. An hour into the trip, the engine started to run rough. No matter; press on! Another half-hour later the temperature indicator on the dash was red-lining. At that time, the trip between Eden and Myrtle Beach was through pretty open country. Rural. No service stations. No assistance of any kind. And it was getting dark and everything was closed, anyway. So we were on our own.
When the engine had cooled enough for us to check, we opened the radiator to discover … almost no water. Well, if that was the only problem we could fix that, so we did – we filled the radiator with water that was available at the side of the road, in a drainage ditch. (Desperate times calling for desperate measures, and all that.)
We got back on our way. Press on! And a half-hour later, the same thing again. Luckily, another drainage ditch.
After many hours of too-frequent stops and the roughest-running car that I’ve ever been in (and which still ran), and taking water from every Low Country drainage ditch we passed (even picking up the odd stray glass or plastic bottle we’d find along the side of the road and filling and capping them to keep in the car with us), we pulled into the condo parking lot at something like 2 in the morning.
Worst. Car Trip. Ever.
Fortunately, by the time we headed home again (early Monday morning, hoping to pull into the parking lot at work before we missed the day there), it was cool, with drizzle and rain all the way home. So we didn’t push the car and we got home without having to stop. (Turns out that his car had a cracked cylinder, so the cooling water was running into the engine – and we were lucky not to have blown the engine completely.)
So the worst car trip ever (eventually, over time) turned into an epic odyssey.
There are still bad days. But “bad stuff happening, that you manage to live through”? Meh, that’s just an adventure that hasn’t been memorialized yet.
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Composing members:
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