Route 66. Driving through the desert. 100 degrees outside. A/C full on. Bruce Springsteen on the stereo.
The landscape that is passing by is the same for miles and miles. Sand, mountains, rocks. Three amigos are roadtripping the US in the classic way. Me and two other guys. One is my really good friend, and the other one is his good friend. So I don’t know the last guy that well.
We spent more than 50 hours together in the car – me as the driver, my friend in the front seat and his friend in the back seat. 50 hours in our pretty white Dodge with so many cool functions we were almost blown backwards. There was no key, you pushed a button to start the car, you could control out of which speaker the majority of the sound should come, control the temperature for the driver, passenger and back individually and I could keep going. But you couldn’t control the smell in the car.
Several times, I was overwhelmed by a gross smell. The kind that takes you by surprise and can clear out a room – but there’s no escape when you’re trapped in a car on the highway in the middle of nowhere. At first, I couldn’t detect the source. But when I started to make sense of things, I figured out that every time the smell came, the backseater (the friend of my friend) had his feet up on the thing in between the two front seats and thereby closer to me. There was a consistent correlation between the two. So smelly feet was the issue.
But when you don’t know a person that well, it’s kind of a taboo to tell them that their feet smell. So instead of commenting upon it – which wouldn’t be very efficient either, since he couldn’t really do anything about it or get rid of it in the car (I suspect those old, worn-out shoes with lots of years behind them to be the real issue) – I would turn off the A/C and go with open windows for a little while. Only though when the air outside is about a 100 degrees, it doesn’t have a very cooling effect. But a change of air was definitely needed sometimes. Then when we did open the windows, my friend, sitting in the passenger front seat, put his arm in the frame, and the new, fresh wind that was supposed to clear out the smelly feet-smell, would be “poisoned” by the sweat odor from his armpit. Being blown straight into the car. Directly towards the backseat. Oh how it isn’t easy to be three in a car in the boiling hot desert and still keep it smelling like rainbows and flowers.
tabooyah 
