There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned road trip: Ranging the open highways on your own schedule, seeking out adventures in strange new places with your strange, old friends! That a feeling of almost complete liberty! Those bold feats of culinary daredevilry, performed in roadside eateries—and the hilarious digestive mishaps that inevitably follow!

That’s the mythology, anyway. The truth is that long days on the road are brain-deadeningly boring, and the close quarters of a compact car can be a crucible that reduces even sturdy camaraderies to calx.

Our last road trip, for example, was a full-on disaster. In retrospect, Milwaukee was a poorly chosen destination for winter break. And our friend Joel brought his Definitive Tom Jones box set—93 tracks, but it was on our last frayed nerve after just two. We argued about the route, culminating in Joel’s siezing the wool stocking cap our aunt knitted for us, and tossing it out the window, never to be seen again. Our heart still bears the scars of resentment, and you can still see where our ears got really chapped.

Why didn’t one of us bring the Vector Game Power System? Instead of arguing non-stop from Bloomington-Normal to Chicago who owed whom how much for gas, we could have taken hour-long turns playing Halo on its seven-inch, high-resolution, color LCD.

It was all the interaction that ruined our friendship. To think, if we’d had the Game Power and an XBox (or Playstation, or Nintendo Game Cube) to help us ignore each other in the car, we might still be pals today—ignoring each other over video games at his house.

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