It's summer, Exxon Mobil has only pocketed $10 billion in the last few months, why not throw the kids in the car for a road trip - that's what I say.

Frankly, I don't understand why we don't receive a thank-you card from oil companies every year.  Without fail, even as prices climb so high that station signs have to be haphazardly expanded to hold all the extra digits, we drive all over the map in our big SUV, which is rated only marginally ahead of the Space Shuttle in terms of fuel efficiency.

This year, we'd finally had enough.  Why should NASA get all the kudos from big oil?  We decided to pull a trailer.  We figured we could just sputter from station to station across the Midwest.  If we joined enough frequent pumper reward clubs, we might even start earning free coffee before we got out of our driveway.

Now, I've pulled a trailer lots of times.  Heck, I own a trailer.  But there's something different about pulling a trailer on a long trip.  See, normally I'm just making a quick run to the building supply shop, and it's rare (half the time is rare, right?) that I'll forget that I have a trailer behind me, or that you're only invisible when your car is moving.  Why do people believe that they can sing and pick their nose when they're driving, but need to act normal once they're at a stoplight?

Anyway, when you pull a trailer on a long trip, it's easy to forget that it's there - at least if you're driving a vehicle that's already the size of your first house.  So, when you glance up at the rear view mirror (once every fifteen minutes, like they said in driver's education), it's easy to momentarily believe that you are being followed by one of the worst tailgaters in history.  This is scary, because we all know that tailgaters are evil swamp monsters with moth droppings for brains.  Even worse, this one doesn't even have a windshield, which can't be safe.  After several such misconceptions involving evasive action and creative swear combinations, my wife was starting to lose patience.  Ha ha!  Just kidding.  We've been married for seventeen years.  She's long since run out of any patience for me.

So after I'd gotten "the look" a few times, I found a way to resolve it.  I just quit looking in the rear view mirror.  That worked great for a few hundred miles, but then my trailer tried to pass me.

Apparently, they get upset when you ignore them.  They're kind of like billionaire heiresses that way.  So my trailer popped off the hitch and started weaving back and forth on its chains. If you've never had this experience, or watched someone else have it (which is what I'd recommend), you'd be amazed just how much a trailer can jump around behind a speeding vehicle without, I don't know, exploding or something.  On the one hand, I was really worried that something very bad was happening to me in that slow motion way that bad things tend to happen.  At the same time, I was fascinated by the whole thing.

Ultimately we were able to stop.  Several other drivers helpfully sped past honking their horn, as if to say, "Hey, your trailer was just doing gymnastics!  You should check it out!"  Perhaps they thought I had only stopped to pee on it.

I got it re-attached and we continued our journey of family fun.  It was only a few miles later when a real crisis occurred, however:  My son's hand held video game system's batteries failed.  Frankly, it's too soon to talk about it.