Meet the family:
Grandpa: He’s short tempered and has a strict itinerary.
Grandma: She’s clinically insane and doesn’t like to take her medication.
Dad: His hemorrhoids are acting up, and he has trouble sitting.
Mom: She has an over-active bladder and likes coffee.
Brother: He’s on a mission to find Bigfoot.
Me: I’m just along for the ride.

My brother and I got fleas from a couch we were sleeping on somewhere in Canada. That was the least of our troubles.

It was day five of a six-day drive from Wisconsin to Alaska. Anytime you have a family packed in a van for that many days in a row, there’s bound to be troubles.

But today was going to be different. Following day after day of driving for 10 hours and not knowing where we’d end up, we finally had a destination. We were going to cross the border from Canada into Alaska, and we were going to see the Alaskan Pipeline. The next day we would be making it to our final stop—my uncle’s house in Anchorage.

At the crack of dawn, we loaded up the blue Ford minivan just like we had the day before. And the day before that. And the day before that.

Grandma was already in the van when we started loading. She had been there all night. Since the cabin-gone-shack we had rented for the night wasn’t exactly the five-star hotel she was used to, she decided it would be better to lock herself inside the van. She wouldn’t even come out to take her medication.

The van was cramped and the air conditioning was limited. It wasn’t one of those luxury vans you see today—complete with individual temperature controls and DVD players. This van had hard bench seats and little legroom.

When I wasn’t thinking about how uncomfortable the van made me, I was seeing incredible sights through its windows: majestic mountains reaching high into the sky, bears beside dense woodlands, a pack of moose blocking the narrow gravel road ahead of us, sunsets and sunrises that produced shades of blue and pink I didn’t even know existed.

We drove all morning, making more stops than usual. Mom made the mistake of drinking coffee at breakfast. With few bathrooms along the way, let’s just say we all spent more time in the woods than any of us wanted. It wouldn’t have been so bad without mosquitoes the size of my hand that swarmed our exposed skin.

At lunchtime, we stopped at a restaurant much like every other restaurant along the way. Five tables, one waitress, one cook, and one menu option. Checkered red and white table cloths reminiscent of an outdoor picnic. A gaudy mix of decorations, most of which were once alive, hanging from wood-paneled walls. Moose heads that hung over us as we ate their descendents.

After lunch, my dad went out to the van and returned to the restaurant carrying a plastic shopping bag with a roll of toilet paper inside. The economy toilet paper just wasn’t cutting it for him. He needed his Charmin two-ply.

After leaving the restaurant, we drove the rest of the way to the Alaskan Pipeline. We could see the pipeline from the van as we drove alongside it. It cut through trees, disappeared behind hills, and stretched across open fields. The pipeline is 800 miles long, and it crosses three mountain ranges and over 800 rivers and streams.  That sounds impressive until I remember how far we traveled to see it.

We came to a viewing site where we could park the van and see the pipeline up close. It was smaller than I expected (48 inches in diameter, to be exact). It was silver. And round.

It was a pipe.

According to the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, which operates and maintains the pipeline, it’s not your everyday pipe. It actually accounts for roughly 20 percent of U.S. annual oil production.

I don’t deny that it’s an important pipe. But if you’ve seen one pipe, you’ve seen ’em all.

After about ten minutes, we all piled back into the van. It would take us the rest of the day to get back on track. The pipeline had put our itinerary a day behind. But when you’re eight years old, itching from fleas, and trapped in a van for six days straight, what’s one more day going to hurt?

Later in the trip, I would narrowly escape being attacked by two moose. A flat tire would cause my grandma to lose control of the van and throw us off the road. My grandpa and my dad would get into an argument at a restaurant about how early we were getting up each morning. My brother would almost get lost after wandering off in search of Bigfoot, and we’d narrowly leave my mom marooned in some town in Canada. And that doesn’t even include the drive back.

You may wonder why we drove to Alaska when we could’ve flown and avoided the harrowing weeklong family road trip.

The answer’s simple. If we had flown, we wouldn’t have seen the pipe.