Sidequest America: My Minivan's GPS Turned a 12-Hour Drive Into a Full RPG Campaign

Every gamer knows the type: the completionist who can't walk past a question mark on the map without investigating it. I have spent decades mocking that player from the comfort of my fast-traveled main story. Then, last month, on a 12-hour drive from Columbus to the Texas panhandle to visit my in-laws, I became that player. Except my map was real, my party was two kids and a spouse with questionable morale, and my quest generator was the GPS app on my dashboard, which I had — mid-drive, unwisely — begun narrating as an NPC.

It started innocently. Somewhere outside Indianapolis, the GPS chirped: "In 40 miles, you will pass a point of interest: World's Largest Rocking Chair." My eight-year-old, deep in a Zelda phase, gasped like the Triforce had appeared on I-70. And I heard myself say the fateful words: "We have time. Let's accept the quest."

Reader, we did not have time.

The Quest Log Begins

I want to be clear that this was a choice. A bad, wonderful choice. From that moment on, I decided the GPS was our quest-giver — a slightly passive-aggressive NPC who clearly resented being asked for directions but was contractually obligated to help. Every suggested stop became a mandatory sidequest. No skipping. No fast travel. We were doing this the hard way, like it was 1998 and there was no wiki.

Sidequest One: The World's Largest Rocking Chair (XP: 150, plus 40 bonus for nobody asking "why")

It was, in fact, a large rocking chair. Was it the world's largest? The plaque said so, and I have never once fact-checked a plaque, because plaques are the lore entries of the real world. My kids climbed it. My spouse took photos. A man in a Cardinals hat told us the chair "used to be bigger," which is either a conspiracy theory or a patch note, and we moved on.

Difficulty Spike: The Truck Stop of Holding

Around hour five, the GPS suggested a truck stop it described only as "Landmark." No further detail. Just: Landmark. This is the gaming equivalent of an unmarked dungeon entrance — you know something's in there, but the game refuses to tell you what.

It was a truck stop with a petting zoo. A petting zoo. At a truck stop. Adjacent to a wall of commemorative knives. There was a goat named Diesel who I'm fairly certain has seen things. My daughter fed Diesel. My son bought a knife-shaped keychain shaped like a knife. I bought coffee that tasted like it had been questing since the Clinton administration.

XP awarded: 300, minus 50 for the bathroom situation, which I will describe only as "a debuff."

The Party Dynamics Got Real

Here's what no RPG warns you about sidequests: your party members have their own quest logs, and they do not align with yours. By hour seven, my spouse had opened negotiations. "We could just," they suggested, in the tone of a companion about to leave the party over a moral disagreement, "drive to the actual place we're going."

Absolutely not. We were three sidequests from a milestone. There was a meteor crater (moderate), a two-headed calf taxidermy exhibit (high), and something called Dinosaur World, which the GPS flagged with what I swear was an ominous chime.

I chose Dinosaur World. The party's approval rating dropped like I'd made a dialogue choice out of a BioWare game.

Final Boss: Arriving Before Dark

Every campaign has its final encounter, and ours was a beast of pure menace: Arriving Before Dark. The in-laws had made a casserole. The casserole had a window. The window was closing.

We hit the last stretch of highway with the sun sitting low and vindictive on the horizon, and I did math I hadn't done since high school physics. My spouse, sensing weakness, made their move: "We could skip the last one."

The last one was a giant mailbox. Just a mailbox, but big. And I looked at that map, and I looked at my party's depleted morale bar, and I made the call every completionist dreads.

We skipped it.

I have thought about that mailbox every day since. Somewhere off Route 287, there is a giant mailbox that never got its XP. It haunts me the way the Chocobo racing mini-game haunts a man who just wanted to finish Final Fantasy X.

The Post-Campaign Wrap-Up

We arrived 3.5 hours late, sunburned, smelling faintly of Diesel the goat, and carrying a keychain knife, a snow globe, and a story. My mother-in-law asked how the drive was, and my son said, "Dad let the GPS run our lives," which is technically accurate and emotionally devastating.

But here's my defense: we will never remember a single minute of the drive we didn't take. The interstate is the tutorial we've all already completed. The sidequests are where the actual game lives — the plaques, the goats, the two-headed calves, the strangers in Cardinals hats dispensing dubious lore.

The GPS has since been demoted back to navigation duty. But sometimes, on the way to the grocery store, it suggests a point of interest, and I hear that little chirp like a quest-complete sound, and my hand drifts toward the turn signal.

My spouse has hidden the turn signal's manual override. We're in couples counseling about it. Worth it.