Our ride was an old beaten-up Chevy Nova, and our destination was northwest Montana to a cousin’s wedding.

My two sisters and I had planned our mini-vacation for months, precisely calculating each hour and mile to get the most out of our wonderful vacation getaway.

Jill, the oldest, would drive the first few hundred miles as Barb, the youngest, read the map, and I would sleep until my turn to navigate the way west as we planned to carry on straight through. Neither Jill nor I trusted Barb’s driving after the hit-and-run incident with a county sheriff’s vehicle.

Somewhere in the middle of North Dakota, Barb became dreadfully quiet and turned a pale shade of greenish grey. Of course, Jill and I thought it was hilarious that Barb was getting car sick until it became a reality right down the middle of I-94. While I was trying to navigate the Nova, hanging halfway out the window for air, Jill was holding the passenger door open and gagging up a storm. Luckily, a rest stop was near and Barb was banned from the car until she could hold her lunch in. This delay was not on our agenda, and the beauty of the Medora wilderness was beheld well after dark. Barb acquired the nickname of “Upchuck”—which positioned a permanent scowl on her face.

At the tourist viewing area overlooking the great caverns and colors of the wilderness, we all took pictures anyway. Who cared if it was pitch dark?

Tired and travel-weary, we all three decided to indulge in just a “short” nap on the benches at the edge of the overlook since onlookers were sparse in the viewing area. About an hour later, Jill must have had one of her “spider” dreams as she lit up off the bench in a screaming fit and slid right through the fence rails over and down, and down, and down. Barb started crying that she would never see her big sister again, and, angry that our trip was yet again postponed, I explained to a hysterical Barb, “Yes, Jill will be back; there is food in the car.” We could smell her before she topped the ridge, and for the rest of our journey, Jill’s nickname would be “Buffalo Poop.”

While reading the map as Barb slept in the back seat and Jill had a sunflower seed spitting contest with herself while driving, I spotted a tiny star right off the Interstate with the golden words “Ghost Town” next to it. I explained to my sisters that their two delays had cost us valuable traveling time already, and this little sightseeing adventure would only cost us a half-hour at the most. Understanding, but rolling their eyes, they granted my wish to see a Ghost in a Town at the top of a mountain. The map read that Garnet, Montana, was just a mile or two away, and after a few vertical S-turns, the clay road turned into a hiking trail with a straight-down drop-off. With no room to turn around, we ventured on and up as my sisters were now agreeing that to see the abandoned gold-mining town and maybe the ghost of “Wild Bill” Hickock would be a great highlight of our vacation.

Passing a corral of cows, the three of us agreed that the owner must feed them by helicopter as there was no way those cows could navigate the steep terrain, much less find any grass. Sometime later, we decided they were “ghost cows.”

After well over an hour of forging up the mountain, Jill sarcastically invented the name “Pilot Parker,” referring to my guiding skills. Blaming a misprint on the map for my guiding dilemma, I agreed to attempt turning around as it had started raining and the ghosts would probably want to stay inside and warm since the temperature was also falling.

After a twenty-five-point turnaround, each one of us started blaming the other for our dreadful vacationing low-lights until the Nova started slip-sliding atop the wet clay on the way down the mountain. Screaming and crying at the same time, Barb ended up white-knuckled behind the wheel while Jill and I walked to avoid certain death over the drop-off. Jill’s flip flops turned into “flip-offs,” and I sported thirty pounds of clay packed onto each one of my boots. Barb would never be the same after a huge evergreen stopped both her and the Nova from sliding over the mountainside on the last S-turn.

Exhausted, covered in mud, and not speaking to one another, Buffalo Poop, Upchuck, and Pilot Parker walked into the wedding chapel as the last bell tolled.

In a recent “remember when” conversation, the three of us laughed and reminisced about our long-ago journey. I kept silent my fears of touching a map or getting near a red gemstone; Jill and I didn’t comment on Barb’s permanent white knuckles; and eldest sister would never, ever tell anyone that she tied herself to the bed at night for fear of falling while she slept…