One fateful day in the middle of the Texas summer, when temperatures were expected to be around 105 degrees, my mother, Jodi, and I pulled up to an off-road park outside of Dallas. It didn’t take us long to realize there wasn’t much shade out there, and that we were in over our heads with this business. Hours later, sunburnt and matted with our own sweat and the park’s dirt, we sat in the booth of a local Mexican-food restaurant talking about how all we wanted to go back and do it all over again. TexPlex Park reached out to me earlier this year, asking if I’d like to come out and jump some off-road vehicles at their facility. It sounded like the perfect second installment of our Jalopnik video series informally known as “Alanis and her mom go drive things, which devolves into Alanis’ mom yelling at her for fudging some of the details about it.” These videos always go well. But mom agreed to go with me despite her past experience with these things, and TexPlex had two of the park’s Maverick X3 vehicles out for us to throw some dirt around with. Traditional off-roading was completely new for my mom and I despite us both having been to rally school, so the park’s vice president, Billy Champion, taught us everything we were supposed to do. Billy even threw us around in the passenger seat on the course a couple of times before we got to drive, to which my mom said, “Screw this, I’m old this is like a bad roller-coaster ride.” She had fun. Unfortunately, because we’re goofy and the heat started to get to us, we didn’t realize the cameras inside of our vehicle died before mom got to drive. That left us with only clips of me driving, and her letting out strings of expletives among her urgent prayers for mercy the whole time. She really did have fun. Either way, we made it out of the park with mother only having tried to kick me in the butt as a form of retaliation once, which is almost a record for us. All in all, it was a successful day.
