NaBloPoMo prompt: What was your most memorable car ride as a kid? As an adult?

Did the prompt suggest short rides, like the ride from my house to the place where my wedding was held?  Or did it suggest longer rides, like road trips.

I remember, when I was a little girl, the drive from my parents' house on Long Island to my grandmother's apartment in Queens.  There was a place in Queens, right off the Long Island Expressway....well, the 1964-1965 Word's Fair had very unusual street lights throughout the park, and when the Fair was over, a number of the light poles -- with their distinctive orange and blue lights -- wound up in a lot on the service road to the expressway.  We rarely drove past Flushing Meadow Park (where the Unisphere and a few other remnants of the Fair still stand), so those lights were like a last reminder of the good times we'd had at the Fair.

My grandmother used to rent a bungalow in the Catskill Mountains every summer.  When we'd drive up there to visit, we'd always stop at the Red Apple Rest Stop.  And before we got to the Tappan Zee Bridge, we'd see an old mansion in tarrytown that looks like a castle, and my Aunt Eileen would tell us "that's where cinderella lives."

The road trip to Virginia when I was 14.  My parents, my sisters and I were planning a vacation in Colonial Williamsburg.  Almost didn't get there, because we had a flat tire in Cherry Hill, NJ.  And I got a lesson in de facto segregation at a rest stop in maryland -- who would have thought it, in 1974?

And the trip to the Rennaisance Faire that wasn't.  Labor Day -- probably 1985 or 1986.  there were four of us in the car -- me, Drew, his buddy Marc and Marc's then-girlfriend.  In those days cars came with two keys, one for the ignition and a separate key for the trunk lock.  We had a cooler full of food -- planned to picnic at the Faire -- but somehow Drew managed to leave the trunk key inside the trunk when he locked it.  And later that day, the car broke down in Elmsford, NY -- halfway to the Faire -- and we were stranded.  On Labor Day.  did manage to find a diner, and Drew's parents drove their station wagon up to elmsford to rescue us.  to this day, we don't say the name of that town out loud without shuddering...

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