Had we never taken those trips in the summer to Mexico, had we not traveled to Houston from the Rio Grande Valley with everything including our rooster, had we not been the family with the pig and chickens in the back yard, I might have been a little surprised or embarrassed to make our road trip, this year, all the way from Texas to DC carrying a box full of sweet bread and a cooler stuffed full of chorizo. But we were, and traveling with all sorts of miscellaneous items is sort of a rite of passage in our family, and so chorizo and sweet bread seemed perfectly normal as traveling companions.
And well the story is they don’t sale this particular brand of chorizo round these parts and when I asked my mother to send whatever she wanted with me to give to my sister in the DC area, she showed up at my house, before we left Texas, with one iced down cooler full of chorizo and a jumbo-sized box full of sweet bread, conchas mainly. I sort of giggled at first at the amount of chorizo she was sending, but then immediately began wondering where we were going to fit all of this extra food.
We had to unload and repack our entire luggage to make room for these two items.
The car we rented is a full size sedan and even at that we had already packed every single crevice in the vehicle with as much stuff as we could fit. In order to fit the cooler, we stuffed it between the passenger’s front seat and back seat on the floor, which then meant my two nephews and Edgar had to take turns sitting with their legs on top of the cooler during the entire cross country road trip, and Anjelica had to sit pretty far up with her seat reclining almost nothing at all. My youngest nephew and Edgar got the short end of the stick here literally because their legs were shorter than the rest of us and they were the ones mostly sharing this uncomfortable position. The sweet bread we just stuffed on top of the dashboard between the back seat and the rear window. It was a little less obtrusive.
Off we went, y en cada parada, anytime we got off the vehicle to stay at a hotel we’d carry our iced-down-chorizo-cooler inside with us. At the hotel in downtown New Orleans, which was the fanciest by far, we did kind of hesitate a little bit about bringing the cooler inside because there were so many people and we were right in front of the entrance of the hotel where everyone could see us lugging it around… still we persisted despite the adversities and honorably carried our special chorizo delivery inside where it could be cooler than outside. By this point we had already made a special stop in Louisiana to pick up dry ice for the chorizo. We weren’t about to give up now.
So in Nashville and everywhere else we stopped the chorizo was top priority, and I’m happy to report it made it all the way here safely and still-edible with us. We’ve been eating a little for breakfast everyday. Totally worth the effort!