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Ronni has joined me today as guest author. Thank you Ronni and Happy Publication Day!
Road Trip by Ronni Cooper
I doubt that there’s a female alive who has watched a certain movie and not dreamed about “doing a Thelma and Louise”.
Gina Davis and Susan Sarandon’s car had just shot off a cliff in the final scene when I found myself calling my best friend. We were due a catch up. She was in Glasgow, while I’d been working in Asia for two years and was planning to head back to the UK a couple of weeks later.
“Let’s do a Thelma and Louise,” I implored, fuelled up with irrepressible enthusiasm of youth. And wine. There had definitely been some wine. “Meet me in New York and we’ll hit the road.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she countered, clearly lacking in the wine stakes. “We can’t do that.”
“Why?”
“Because…. because… they die at the end.”
She had a point.
“Okay, let’s do it but without the whole dying bit.”
There was a pause. “I’ll need to think about it,” she said hesitantly. Immediately followed by, “Right, I’ve thought about it. When are we going?”
Two weeks later, we set off from opposite sides of the globe for a rendezvous at JFK airport. There we met a chatty cab driver who took us to our hotel. Judging by the fare, we went via several American states.
Next morning, we hired a car and set off. I was Thelma, she was Louise – but without the A-list paychecks or Gina Davis’s teeth.
New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, then back to New York. For two weeks, we drove, stopping off when the mood took us, singing along to local radio stations, sleeping in tatty motels and plush hotels and chatting. Yep, we gabbed our way through approximately 2600 miles.
Of course, it wasn’t as dramatic as the movie, but it came close. Along the way we stumbled into a Taiwanese drinking den in New York and spent the night playing mah-jong with men who looked like they could kill us with their thumbs. We got lost. A million times. We stopped for gas in the middle of the night somewhere in the deep south and were served by a man holding a gun. We got pulled over for speeding. Twice. We hung out with racing drivers in Daytona Beach. And we were involved in a major police incident when a crazy woman tried to break down our motel door with an axe because she thought her husband was inside with his mistress. He wasn’t. He was next door, no doubt calling a divorce lawyer as she was led away in cuffs.
Two decades later, we still look back on it as being a true highlight of our lives.
So if your best friend ever calls you up with a crazy plan, go for it. Just remember to decide which one is Thelma, and which one is Louise – and try to avoid the whole dying bit at the end.
Manhattan will be published by Sphere on 22nd Dec 2011
Ronni Cooper is on facebook, twitter and at www.ronnicooper.com
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