"A family road trip is supposed to be a lot of fun ... unless, of course, you're the Heffleys. The journey starts off full of promise, then quickly takes several wrong turns. Gas station bathrooms, crazed seagulls, a fender bender, and a runaway pig, not exactly Greg Heffley's idea of a good time. But even the worst road trip can turn into an adventure and this is one the Heffleys won't soon forget."--Back cover.

Against the wishes of his mortician mother, Hadorah, twelve-year-old Walter and classmate Cordelia take a hearse on a road trip to meet legendary inventor Flasterborn, who once mentored Walter's long-dead father.

Charlie, twelve, who has autism and obsessive compulsive disorder, must endure a cross-country trip with his siblings and a strange babysitter to visit their father, who will undergo brain surgery.

Twelve-year-old Margie finds her sister, Peep, intolerable since the youngster skipped from third grade to sixth, but when their mother leaves home, Margie packs Peep into their father's car and starts driving across Kentucky to find her.

When seventeen-year-old Harry Fogg undertakes a race against time to win a wager with a member of his famous father's club, he puts to good use the recklessness and fascination with all things mechanical that have caused him trouble in Victorian England.

Eleven-year-old Maybelle Lane collects sounds. She records the Louisiana crickets chirping, Momma strumming her guitar, their broken trailer door squeaking. But the crown jewel of her collection is a sound she didn't collect herself: an old recording of her daddy's warm-sunshine laugh, saved on an old phone's voicemail. It's the only thing she has of his, and the only thing she knows about him. Until the day she hears that laugh--his laugh--pouring...