Every single holiday break, we go to Virginia Beach to visit my mom’s side of the family. Of course, we don’t take the two hour non-stop flight; that would be too easy. My mom and dad like a challenge. They instead insist on taking the twenty-hour non-stop car ride.

My dad picks us up right at three, and we leave straight from school. My dad is incredibly punctual, and waiting a couple of minutes to change out of our school clothes would already be wasting too much time. So, we have to change in the moving car. We get on I-10 and head east. We spend the first few hours on our various electronic devices – playing games or texting, but after a while we get screen-drunk, and so we read or play highway games instead. My dad and I always see if we can find all fifty license plates from every state. We’ve never done it, but we’ve gotten pretty close. We always get Alaska but never get Wyoming.

At around 7:00, we stop at the rundown Wendy’s wherever we are. My three brothers and I always order the same thing: a Number 10, upsized, with Sprite. We try to eat fast because my dad always stops at Blockbuster before we leave New Orleans and picks up movies for the ride. For some reason, they make us wait until after dinner to watch them. But of course, before we can return to the car, we have to go to the bathroom. We all cram into the small Wendy’s bathroom, and taking turns takes forever. The bathroom is filthy and there is graffiti on the walls. I try to keep my youngest brother Roan from seeing the “F*** Society!” messages, while Finn, my other brother, tries not to step on dried pee.

During the night, we switch drivers. Most of the difficult work like getting on and off the interstate is done in the day, and since my dad doesn’t trust my mom with anything, he gives her the night shift. Slowly, as the hours wear on, each of my brothers shut down whatever they are watching or listening to and drifts off to sleep. I only wake up once or twice. I look up and out the window of the car and see the trees passing by one after another as if they could go on forever, but then I fall back asleep before I know where they end. If I’m lucky, I wake up at a gas station where I talk my dad into a midnight snack: powdered donuts, which I always end up making a mess with. I always forget napkins which means I have to wipe the dust on my brothers’ clothes while they sleep; they’ll never know.

I’m always the first one to wake up in the morning. I guess I’m just really excited to get to Virginia and see everyone. Instead of letting me wake up my brothers to share my excitement with our closely approaching destination, my dad makes me lets them sleep. They eventually wake up, just in time for breakfast. Breakfast is at Cracker Barrel, no exceptions. It is dad’s favorite part of the trip. After we are quickly seated and receive our food, we shove it down. It’s embarrassing, looking around and seeing all the truck drivers looking at you judgmentally, but who really cares? We don’t mind. Before we leave the restaurant (it is smartly set up to force you through a gift shop), Roan always wants to get something. My dad always gives in. I can’t even count how many chubby stuffed birds (he gets one every time) from that gift shop that are just lying around the house. Outside the restaurant, there are long lines of rocking chairs, so usually we play in them for a while and get a couple of photos taken, but we can’t waste too much time, so it’s back to the road.

This is it: the part that feels the longest. Dad takes over again, and mom collapses in the back seat after driving all night. I move up to the front. None of my brothers pull out their electronics and get sucked into the world of video games. Instead, we just talk, maybe about school, our problems, and our goals; what we actually say isn’t the point. I always learn one new thing from my dad and my brothers on this part of trip. It’s funny that I’m still learning these things after living with them for so long. It’s just that at home, everyone’s so busy and we never have time to talk. Here – on the final leg—we have, it seems like, all the time in the world. This trip doesn’t encourage us to be closer; it forces us to be closer. But as we pull up into my grandmother’s driveway, bloodshot and broken down, we all feel a certain accomplishment that we got through that car ride, but also that we’re closer, and nothing is better than that.