On the Road Again Read online

  Text copyright © 2008 by David Homel and Marie-Louise Gay

  Illustration copyright © 2008 by Marie-Louise Gay

  Published in Canada and the USA in 2012 by Groundwood Books

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  This edition published in 2012 by

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press Inc.

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  or c/o Publishers Group West

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  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Gay, Marie-Louise

  On the road again! : more travels with my family / by Marie-Louise Gay and David Homel.

  eISBN 978-1-55498-303-2

  I. Homel, David II. Title.

  PS8563.A868O52 2011 jC813’.54 C2010-904468-1

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF).

  To our friends and neighbors in Celeriac

  The big surprise

  “Guess what, Charlie?” yelled my brother as he burst into my bedroom.

  He was wearing his plaid Sherlock Holmes cap with the flaps, and he was clutching a magnifying glass in his hand.

  “Hmm… Let’s see,” I said. “You’ve been spying on Mom and Dad.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

  Max shrugged. He had no idea what I was talking about. He had never actually read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He’d only looked at the pictures.

  “You’ll never guess where we’re going on our next trip.”

  And before I could answer, he shouted, “France! That’s right, Vee ahre goink to Frahnce.”

  He put on his Pink Panther fake French accent. He always mixes up the Pink Panther and Sherlock Holmes. What a knucklehead!

  That was some pretty exciting news. I’d always dreamed of going to Paris. I’d even made a list of the things I wanted to see.

  First off was the Eiffel Tower, of course. No elevator for me. I’d climb every one of the 1,665 steps to the very top and see the whole city at my feet. Then I wanted to look at the spot where the Hunchback of Notre Dame took the plunge.

  Next on my list was the underground stuff: the metro that was a hundred times bigger than Montreal’s subway system, and a boat ride through the sewers of Paris. They both probably smelled about the same. And I’d read somewhere that you could visit caves under the city where the Romans used to bury their dead. You could see huge piles of skulls and bones by candlelight! Try and picture that!

  Not to mention the French Disneyland. That’s right. There is a French version of Disneyland not far from Paris. I wondered if Mickey Mouse wore a beret and carried a loaf of French bread under his arm. I couldn’t wait to find out.

  We went into the living room where my parents were studying a gigantic map of France. It looked as if every little village and stream and castle was marked on this map of theirs. Maybe even every mushroom!

  And that was how I found out that we were not going to Paris after all. My mother had her finger on the name of a village that was smaller than a speck of dust, somewhere in the hills in the southern part of France. When she took her finger off the dot, I read the name of the village.

  It was called Celeriac. Sell-air-ee-ack. I think that’s some kind of a vegetable. Imagine coming from a village that’s named after a vegetable. And not even a famous one either!

  “We have a big surprise for you,” she announced.

  My brother and I looked at each other. Our parents’ surprises usually mean bad news for us. Like the time we nearly died in a sandstorm in the middle of the Arizona desert because they didn’t want to go to a normal place like the Grand Canyon. Or that little picnic we had with the alligators in some swamp whose name I still can’t pronounce.

  “We’re going to live in Celeriac for a year,” my mother told us. “We found a lovely old house that’s walking distance from your new school. And the countryside is breathtaking. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  My brother and I stared at her. Was my mother going crazy? A year in France?

  “It’s going to be a real cultural experience,” my father chimed in. “They have a great civilization there.”

  He started reeling off all the different cultural attractions we were going to enjoy. Let’s see… There would be castles and plenty of ruins, courtesy of the Romans, but without any skulls and piles of bones. Pieces of aqueducts, oppidums and all sorts of other things I had never heard of.

  My father went on and on. The trip was going to be like Asterix, but without the jokes. Or like a year-long history class without recess.

  I looked at my parents. They were smiling away.

  But I couldn’t believe it! They had secretly planned the whole trip without even talking about it with me. I didn’t want to leave my friends, my school and my neighborhood. I didn’t want to spend a year in a tiny village named after a vegetable, hidden away in the mountains somewhere.

  How come parents think they can just decide for you? It’s not fair!

  And that’s exactly what I told them.

  “You’ll make new friends,” my mother said. “You’re good at that. It will be an incredible experience. I’m sure it will change your life.”

  “I like my life just the way it is.”

  “You’ll remember the trip for years to come,” my mother went on.

  “You mean I’ll have nightmares every night?”

  “You’ll see, Charlie,” my father said. “It’ll be a great adventure. And we’ll be back before you know it. You’ll have some great stories to tell your friends.”

  I hated to admit it, but he did have a point. My friends were always pretty impressed by my travel adventures.

  In the end, I made a deal with my parents. After our year in the village, we would go to Paris and see everything on my list.

  My little brother started jumping up and down like a frog. He grabbed Miro, our cat.

  “Miro,” he yelled. “Guess what? We’re going to France!”

  I saw my parents look at each other.

  Then I understood. Miro wasn’t coming with us.

  ONE

  We lose my brother on the airplane

  So there we were on the day of our departure, at the beginning of an incredible adventure, as my mother would say, but we were too disorganized to get out of the house. As usual, my family made a big embarrassing show for the whole neighborhood.

  First, Miro decided to hide. He didn’t want to leave home either. My mother and I walked around the house and up and down the alleyway, calling his name. Finally I discovered him underneath the front porch. I crawled under and grabbed him. But Miro can be really stubborn sometimes. He dug in his paws and refused to budge. When I finally managed to drag him from under the porch, we were both muddy and
covered in cobwebs. I had to change my clothes while my mother dusted off Miro.

  Then my brother started to cry because he didn’t want to leave Miro, even though our cat was going to be happy staying at my grandmother’s house. Better than chasing French mice in some backward mountain village! He would be treated like a king at my grandmother’s. Round-the-clock food! All the petting he wanted! He would be enormous by the time we came back.

  Our friends who were taking us to the airport were parked outside, honking their horn and pointing at their watches. That’s because my father kept rushing back into the house because he forgot something.

  The first time, it was his glasses. The second time, it was his typewriter and all the notes for the book he was supposed to be writing in France. Believe it or not, my father still uses a typewriter!

  We were finally on our way when my brother realized he’d forgotten his penguin. So we rushed back inside again. Our friends must have wished they’d never offered to drive us to the airport.

  My mother was looking more and more frazzled.

  “That’s enough!” she yelled. “You’ve got one minute to find that penguin, or we’ll leave without it!”

  My mother’s the kind of person who likes to be at the airport early, hours before the plane leaves. That wasn’t going to happen today.

  Of course, I found the penguin, under Max’s bed. Then we rushed back to the car.

  After we checked our baggage, my father gave us a long speech about how we had to be serious at the security gate. We weren’t supposed to say words like “gun” or “bomb,” or make jokes about hijacking the airplane.

  At the X-ray machine, the guards made my father take off his cowboy boots. I suppose a man who doesn’t look anything like a cowboy and who is wearing cowboy boots seems suspicious. I knew it — there were holes in both his socks.

  The security guard picked up my brother’s stuffed penguin and poked it in the stomach.

  “Hmm… This penguin looks rather fat. Are you sure you didn’t hide anything in it?”

  Was that a joke? From the security guard’s expression, I couldn’t tell. That must be the first thing you learn in security guard school: how to keep a poker face, no matter what.

  My brother looked very insulted. He grabbed the penguin from the guard’s hand and marched right past the metal detector, toward our gate. Good thing he didn’t have any metal in his pockets.

  “Wait!” my father called, struggling to get his boots back on.

  “Go and catch up to him,” my mother ordered me. “Don’t let him get lost.”

  It was starting already. I was going to have to look after my brother, as usual.

  I found him standing in front of the window of the duty-free store, looking at all the electronic stuff for sale, cameras and iPods and watches. He still looked insulted.

  “They let your penguin through, didn’t they? So what’s the matter?”

  “That man said he was fat!”

  And he went on staring at the gadgets in the window. My brother is so touchy about his penguin.

  But we weren’t through arguing with the people who worked at the airport. When I looked up, I saw my mother trying to convince the man at the gate that her enormous portfolio with all her drawings inside would fit on the plane. The man was shaking his head No. My mother was nodding her head Yes. Everyone was staring at her, since she was holding up the line. To make matters worse, my father joined the conversation, too.

  I just stared at the gadgets in the store window and pretended that I didn’t know these people. Sometimes parents are just too embarrassing.

  My mother and the man ended up compromising. My mother could take her portfolio on the plane. But it would have to go in a special closet where the crew kept their bags. That was good enough for her.

  Once we boarded the plane, my father kept telling us not to be scared, and how safe air travel is. I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Then I figured out that he was the one who was scared, because right away he took a sleeping pill. As the plane took off, my father sat rigid, staring straight ahead, hardly breathing at all. He finally relaxed a little when we reached our cruising altitude.

  But the pill sure worked fast! In no time he was snoring away with his mouth open.

  “Don’t bother him,” my mother told us. “After we land, he has to drive all day to Celeriac.”

  She didn’t look very happy, maybe because she was squished in next to my brother and me. No chance of her falling asleep!

  We had been on airplanes before, but never on one this huge, and with so much free stuff. My brother started exploring the big pocket in the seat in front of him. He opened the “For Your Comfort” bag and took out everything. He put on the pair of socks. He wanted to brush his teeth with the toothbrush that already had toothpaste on it, but my mother told him to wait until after dinner. He put on the sleeping mask and pretended to be a robber, which didn’t make much sense, since how can you be a robber if you can’t see anything?

  Then he started playing with the telephone that was on the back of the seat in front of him.

  “I’m going to call Grandma,” he announced.

  I knew you needed a credit card to make the phone work, so there was no danger of that happening. I started reading the in-flight magazine. It had all kinds of information about the plane we were on.

  Then I heard my brother talking. I figured he was just pretending to talk to Grandma, fooling around the way he always does. The next thing I knew, he started meowing, which is how he talks to Miro.

  Then he hung up the phone.

  “Grandma says Miro is just fine,” he said. “But Miro says he misses us already.”

  I took the phone from the seat back. I couldn’t hear anything.

  “It worked for me,” my brother said proudly. “You have to say the secret password.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

  “Hello,” he said.

  Another one of his jokes! But then I heard Grandma on the other end of the line, talking to the cat, and Miro meowing back. Then she hung up.

  I’ll never understand how he did it. It must cost a fortune to talk on the phone in an airplane when you’re a million kilometers above the earth. Talk about long distance!

  Though the plane was enormous, everything in it was very small. A tiny meal arrived on a tiny tray. On the tray were miniature packets of salt and pepper. The knives and forks were made for elves, and those elves could have used the tiny ketchup containers for their elf French fries.

  Not to mention the bathrooms. They were smaller than my closet at home. You could sit on the toilet and wash your face in the sink at the same time, as I soon found out.

  After the meal, I got out Silverwing, the book I was reading. Ever since I saw millions of bats flying out of a cave at nightfall from the Carlsbad Caverns, I’ve wanted to learn everything I can about them. The book is incredible. The author must have been a bat in another life. Otherwise, how could he know what bats think and feel?

  My mother was reading to my brother. He had brought Chicken Little with him. The two of them were squeaking, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

  I really didn’t think that was a good choice for a story, since we were actually in the sky. The passenger on the other side of the row thought the same way I did. He kept shooting little looks at my mother.

  My brother gets bored quickly. He didn’t want to read any more. He wanted to bother my mother. And he’s very good at it. He kept asking when we were going to get to France, and how come the time was different there, and how was it that something as heavy as an airplane could stay up in the sky.

  Finally, my mother got so tired of him that she told me to take him to see the pilot.

  “How do you know they’ll let us in the cockpit?”
/>   “You’re kids,” she said. “They always let kids do that. Now just go.”

  We had to pass through First Class to reach the cockpit. That’s the section of the plane where the seats are bigger, and where there is even more stuff in the “For Your Comfort” bag. You get more pillows, and champagne instead of apple juice in a box.

  “I wouldn’t mind sitting up here,” my brother said.

  A flight attendant stopped us.

  “And where are you boys headed?” she asked.

  “We want to see the cockpit,” my brother announced loudly.

  “Really? Are you going to fly the plane?”

  She must have told that joke a hundred times.

  “Computers fly the plane,” I told her. “Everybody knows that.”

  “Well, you can tell that to the pilots and see what they say,” she laughed.

  When we entered the cockpit with the flight attendant behind us, both the pilot and the co-pilot were eating their dinners, which does prove that computers really do fly the plane. I was surprised to see they had the same food we did. I was sure they would be eating something better.

  They stopped eating and showed us the throttle — they called it the joystick. Then we saw the radar screen, the speedometer, the altimeter that tells you how high you are and all sorts of other things.

  My brother was so impressed he didn’t even say anything. And that’s pretty rare.

  Then the pilot pulled on a metal handle that was hanging from the ceiling. A weird vibrating sound started up that was pretty loud. My brother jumped and hit his head on the fire extinguisher.

  “Don’t worry!” the pilot laughed. “We’re just starting up the lawn mower. It’s time to cut the grass.”

  My brother looked around, rubbing his head. He didn’t know what to think.

  “That’s the warning signal,” the co-pilot said, “for when we’re losing altitude. But don’t worry. My colleague was just playing tricks on you. He’s always doing that. Imagine if you were his kids!”

  “I wish my father was a pilot,” my brother said. Then he looked at me. “Don’t tell Dad that, okay?”