Road Trip!
Lyra and Bon Bon Drive to Trotcon
Admiral Biscuit
Lyra paced around Jeff's living room, while Bon Bon lounged in a recliner reading Fifty Shades of Gray. The two mares were alone for the weekend; their human host had left town for the weekend to attend a convention and rather rudely hadn't invited them along.
“You're going to wear out the rug,” Bon Bon advised, then turned her eyes back to her book. Things were starting to heat up for Anastasia and Christian.
“We could go too.”
“Huh?” Bon Bon looked back up. “Go where?”
“To Trotcon.”
Bon Bon raised an eyebrow. “I had the trots once. It was awful.”
“It's a convention, Bonnie. About ponies—about us. And we could go!”
“How?”
“Jeff's got two cars and he only took one of them.”
“Lyra, you don't know how to drive.”
“Sure I do. I've played Grand Theft Auto and watched Jeff drive. Come on, Bonnie, it'll be fun.”
Bon Bon sighed and closed her book. “Okay, fine. I'll pack some snacks for us.”
Ten Minutes Later
“It's locked.” Bon Bon tugged futilely at the door handle.
“Hm, that's odd. Jeff doesn't usually lock his cars. I wonder why he did this time?” Lyra stood on her hind hooves to get a look inside.
“I can't imagine,” Bon Bon said sarcastically. “I think I'm going to go back to my book. Anastasia was just about to—“
“The keys are in the ignition. If I can get it unlocked. . . .” A golden aura twirled around the key fob. Bon Bon set down her picnic basket and leaned against the door on the other side so she could watch.
“Couldn't you just press the unlock button?”
“I could if I knew which button it was. But there are lots of buttons and—there! Got it!” The key, dangling from the fob, bobbed in the air just above the driver's seat. “Now if I can just get them out the back—good thing he left the speed brakes open.” Lyra threaded the keys through the van and out the vent windows.
“Why are they called speed brakes?”
“Because they slow it down,” Lyra explained. “Trust me, it's all pretty basic stuff.”
She stuck the key in the lock, turned it, tugged the door handle, turned it the other way, and then opened the door. With a little bit of fumbling, she got the other doors unlocked. Bon Bon put the picnic basket in the back and climbed up into the passenger seat.
Lyra stuck the key in the ignition, and—having learned from the doors—turned it the correct way this time. The instrument panel lights all illuminated and then the van grumbled to life.
She jiggled the shifter handle, attempting to put the van in gear like she'd seen Jeff do so many times, but it wouldn't budge.
Bon Bon raised an eyebrow as Lyra's magic reached out and opened the glove box, took out the owner's manual, and began flipping through it.
Finally, triumphantly, she put her hoof on the brake and this time the shifter moved easily. “Piece of cake.”
“Are you sure you know what you're doing?”
• • •
“Toldja I know how,” Lyra said smugly as she merged onto I-94.
“Yeah, yeah.” Bon Bon fussed with the buttons on the radio; they had traveled so far already that they were out of range of the station she'd been enjoying. “Why do the controls have to be so small?”
“At least it has buttons,” Lyra observed. “Unlike Jeff's iPad.”
“True. Thank Celestia for small favors.” Having found a station she liked, Bon Bon started bobbing her head as the raw and unpolished music of Metallica filled the van.
“HEY BONS?”
“Sorry.” Bon Bon turned down the volume to a more acceptable level. “Is that better?”
“I could hear it in my horn.” Lyra tilted her head down and lifted a stack of maps out of the pocket on the van. “We haven't got Navi with us—I imagine that Jeff took it—so we're going to have to use these.” She flipped through until she found both a Michigan map and an Ohio map.
“You know it would have been easier to figure this out before we left the house. We could have put these on the kitchen table.”
“I know more or less where we're going. It's east, then south, then more east. I just don't know specifically what roads we need to be on. But look, we're already going in the right direction—east—and we can't go too far east because we'd run into the Detroit River.”
“More or less.” Bon Bon sighed and unfolded the Michigan map. “Where are we right now?”
“On I-94, going east.”
“Well, that's helpful.” Bon Bon traced her hoof across the line of the highway. “There are tiny little numbers . . . wait, I get it. The road has numbers, too. So we're at 169, which is here. And let's see.” She studied the map some more before coming to a conclusion. “Basically, we want to go south on US-23. Then the map ends when it gets to Ohio so I don't know what we do there, but that's not for a while yet.”
“How far is US-23?”
“How far is it between numbers?”
• • •
Thanks to Bon Bon's good directions and plenty of road signs, Lyra made the correct turn onto US-23 and uneventfully merged with all the other traffic headed south. “I'd bet ten bits that when the exit numbers reach zero, we'll be in Ohio,” she observed. “Or else the highway will end.”
“Then we're getting close,” Lyra squealed. “Because we're at 29 now.”
Bon Bon glanced back down at the map and followed the road to the border. “Well, we don't have to change off this until we're out of the state, so I guess I can get out the Ohio map and figure out what we're going to do there.
That turned out to be more of a challenge. While there was one good way to Ohio, once they got there there were no direct routes to Columbus. She'd managed to figure out the different symbols for types of roads, and correctly come to the conclusion that highways were best, so she instead had to choose the least bad option.
She hadn't realized how long it was taking until Lyra reached over and poked her in the shoulder. “Hey, look, we're almost in Ohio.”
Sure enough, right in the center median was a big, billboard-sized sign which welcomed them to the heart of America. It was followed by lots of signs on the right side advising them of Ohio traffic laws, and a changeable message sign giving a body count for the roads.
Bon Bon got distracted reading all the signs until they were approaching a junction and Lyra frantically asked her which way to go.
Bon Bon grumbled, struggling to hold the map so she could read it. “Um, okay, you want to go south on I-475.”
“Gotcha.” Lyra briefly pushed the turn signal stalk before darting across lanes. An angry honk from the BMW she'd cut off accompanied her maneuver.
Lyra turned her head back at the car. “Suck my dick!”
“Lyra, you don't have a dick.”
Lyra shrugged. “They don't know that. Anyway, it's the thought that counts.”
The two rode in silence until they got close to Perrysburg, then Bon Bon pointed a hoof out the window at a barn. “Lyra, that barn has your cutie mark!”
“Why, so it does.” Lyra stared admiringly at it until a rumble from the tires informed her that she was drifting off the road.
“Lyra, pay attention,” Bon Bon chided. “Remember that sign we saw right after crossing the border?”
“The one that said 364 traffic deaths this year?”
“Yeah—we don't want to add to that.”
“Sorry, Bonnie. I'll pay better attention to the road.”
“If you don't, I'll drive and you can read the map.” She looked up then back down at the map. “Speaking of which, you ought to get in the right lane—the interchange between I-475 and I-75 is coming up.”
Lyra nodded and this time checked her mirrors before changing lanes. “Hey Bons?”
“Yeah?”
“You're a lot cuter than Navi.”
• • •
Lyra slowed the van at the end of a long queue of traffic and sighed. “Of course we'd hit road construction.”
“Do you think the road to Columbus isn't even finished? It's on the map, so it should be . . . you'd think they'd have said if it wasn't.”
“No, no,” Lyra reassured her. “They're just fixing it.”
Bon Bon looked at the bare swath of dirt on the right hand side of the van dubiously. “Just fixing it? They took it away.”
“They have machines which put it back.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. There are trucks like the one in front of us that are filled with road-powder—it's like flour, but black—and they dump it out into a mixing machine that flattens it down and bakes it, and that's how roads are made.”
“So it's like baking.”
“It's pretty much the same thing. Shit.” Lyra slammed on the brakes as the truck in front of them stopped. “I know, don't say it.”
“Say what?” Bon Bon pointed out the window. “He's just leaning on his shovel.”
“Must be a supervisor.” Lyra lightly touched her hoof to the accelerator pedal.
“I think I see a pavement-maker in front of us.”
“All I see is the back of this truck and the pegamoose on its flaps,” Lyra grumbled.
“You'll see it soon enough.” Bon Bon rolled down her window and stuck her head out. “Ew, it smells pretty nasty.”
“Dumb construction.” Lyra braked the van to a complete halt again. “Highways are supposed to be quick.”
“They should fix them when nopony's using them,” Bon Bon unfolded the map. “Maybe there's another way.”
“I wish there was.” Lyra honked the horn, which did nothing to motivate the semi truck in front of them.
Finally, traffic started picking up speed. Both ponies were silent until the reached the end of the construction zone, their attention partially drawn towards the collection of road machines which were busily laying down a fresh strip of asphalt.
Lyra eventually broke the silence. “I bet you like this scenery.”
“Hm?”
“All this farmland.” She made a sweeping gesture with her hoof.
Bon Bon nodded. “It's hard to believe how big they are. Just the thought of having all that land under my hooves . . . farmhumans must have really big families.”
“And really big tractors.”
“Yeah, they—hey, Lyra, what's that?” Bon Bon pointed to a high-tension power lines. “I've seen a few of them crossing over fields.”
“It's a power line,” Lyra informed her. “Like the one that goes to Jeff's house. The more electricity that's in them, the higher up they put them.”
“Because it looks like a pegasus fence.”
Lyra snickered. “An electric pegasus fence. That'd stop them. Zap!”
• • •
“Um, Lyra?”
“Yeah?”
“Wasn't that Findlay that we just went through?”
“I think it was. Why?”
“We were supposed to get off I-75 and get on US-68.”
“Well, we'll just get off at the next exit and turn around.”
Bon Bon looked back at the map. “The exits are numbered in miles, right?”
Lyra nodded.
“Then it's, like, fifteen miles to the next exit.” She squinted down at the map. “On the positive side, it's an east/west road.”
“Then we'll just take that,” Lyra said. “It'll be faster than turning around and going back.”
“We can stop and have a snack, too,” Bon Bon suggested. “I'm a little bit hungry.”
“What did you bring?”
“Granola bars, instant oats, bread, cheese, and Coke.”
“Mm.” Lyra licked her lips. “I wouldn't mind having some oats now.”
Bon Bon shook her head. “No. You've got to focus on driving.”
“I can do two things at once. Why shouldn't I?”
“Because I'll never forgive you if you kill us. My ghost will haunt yours forever.”
“Ghosts can't haunt ghosts.”
“You don't know that.” Bon Bon crossed her forehooves. “I've seen some shit, Lyra.”
• • •
Lyra turned off the exit ramp and into a small parking lot. As she passed the Park and Ride sign, she raised an eyebrow.
“I don't think it means that.”
“A mare can dream, Bons.” She turned off the van and looked Lyra in the eye. “Food?”
“At least you don't have just a one-track mind.” Bon Bon opened her door. “It's in back, and I need to stretch my hooves anyway.” On the ground, she grabbed the handle for the sliding door with her mouth and tugged it open, then reached inside and pulled out her picnic basket. She poured out a small bowl of oats for Lyra and a second one for herself, then struggled to twist the cap off a bottle of Coke.
“I don't know how you can drink that stuff. It makes my nose all tickly.”
“You've just got to let the fizz out.” Bon Bon gripped the cap in her teeth and twisted the bottle around until the cap came off, then tapped it on the ground until the bubbles finally diminished completely. “I would have prefered fruit juice, but Jeff didn’t have any in his fridge.”
When they’d finished their snack and gotten back on the road, the next hour passed fairly uneventfully. There was a bit of a delay while Bon Bon consulted the owner's manual to find out how to turn on the map light so she could see to navigate, and Lyra used the opportunity to figure out how to turn the van's headlights on.
After a few twists and turns through a small town, they saw a sign pointing the way to US-23.
“Finally back on a highway,” Lyra said.
“I like them better,” Bon Bon admitted. “It's a bit nerve-wracking to have all those cars coming right at you.”
“And all the traffic lights,” Lyra said. “They'd be a lot easier to figure out if we had trichromatic vision. Especially at night, 'cause you've got to get close to figure out what position the light's in.”
“If they were smart, they'd make them different shapes.” As they passed a mile marker, Bon Bon looked back down at the map. “It's not too far. Only a couple more exits.”
Lyra took her hooves off the wheel long enough to clap her hooves together, then grabbed back at it as the van's tendency to pull right reasserted itself. “Dumb van.”
“Maybe that's why Jeff took his car,” Bon Bon observed.
“Probably.” Lyra yawned. “Phew, this is a lot more work than I thought it would be. Is that our exit?”
“Next one.” Bon Bon said. “Better get into the right lane.”
“After I pass this truck. It's going too slow.” She mashed down on the accelerator pedal.
Once she'd cleared the truck, she got into the right lane, leaving the turn signal on for the remaining distance to the exit.
“I saw the hotel as we went by,” Lyra said. “So I think I can navigate from here.”
“Good, because this map isn't very detailed. It leaves a lot of roads off.” Bon Bon started folding it back up.
Lyra turned down the road that she figured led to the hotel, her navigation made simpler by the fact that she could see the top of it over the short, decorative trees that lined the road.
“First singletree, and now doubletree,” Lyra said. “Must be really close. Is there a tripletree?”
“No, if you're pulling three abreast you use a singletree, a doubletree, and an equalizer,” Bon Bon said. “Or you could also use—is that a glue factory? What kind of convention is this?”
“We'll know soon,” Lyra said cheerfully. “Almost there.”
“Lyra?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember what I said about my ghost haunting yours? It still applies after we get out of the van.”
“Duly noted.” Lyra turned the van into a parking space and shut it off. “Come on, let's see who's inside.”