I don’t write much here about my own relationship. It’s a happy one, after all, and that’s a boring read.

This week, though, we’re on a road trip together through the U.S., cooped up alone in a car for hours at a time, so there’s potential for horrible, juicy strife. 

We’re long past our first trip together and, hopefully, still far from booking separate vacations, so the idea of going off somewhere together still sounds like fun, rather than an obligation. Once that’s not the case anymore, you’ve got trouble.

Trouble has a way of finding you anyway. Any travel promises certain tests of endurance and humour. We’ve already run into some bad food, some worse weather, and a couple of those missed exits that can set driver and navigator quietly or not-so-quietly blaming the other, but we’re still holding up.

There’s a risk to the domestic peace, of course, in spending this much uninterrupted time together, outside the unexamined daily routines and distractions, but as the kilometres go by, you might also have the time to actually talk about something.

Expectations can run a little high. You’ve finally got the chance to get away together and damned if it’s not going to be postcard perfection. Then your plan collides with reality.

Meticulous, detailed plans simply beg to be thwarted, so our itinerary so far has been a loosely arranged affair, a night out with some good mutual friends in Toronto, a rib place in North Carolina with a name that privately amuses us, the tourist trapping grounds of Myrtle Beach, where I spent car-bound family vacations as a kid.

That last was my idea, and it was largely a bust, with spring break louts hooting up and down a charmless main strip, a disastrous meal, and a shabby motel room that cost less than the meal.

It’s in such moments of manifest imperfection that I remember listening to my parents bicker from the backseat of that hot car or the unmistakable tone an ex’s voice would take on when she was definitely not having fun and it was definitely my fault.

But the sun’s up, and once it rises above the wall of corporate beachfront hotels, it’s going to be a beautiful day. We still don’t hate each other. So far, so OK.