It should be apparent by this point in the life of this blog that safety is not high on the list of traits packed into one man known as HungryMan.

Whether it is sledding, log riding or jumping on a trampoline flinging his three-year-old girl like a ragdoll with a spring coil neck, my husband likes to push the bounds and limits of safety.

The whole “Fred-drives-HungryMan’s-car-home-and-back-again” scenario worked great except for one glitch: how do we reunite in Iowa. Heather’s wonder-van with doors that open and close at a push of button and DVD-player that operates from the front dash does has its limitations.

Namely, seven seats with seven seatbelts. Heather and her girls take up five of those seatbelts leaving our family two.

Now a sensible person would look that this situation and conclude that if there is only two seats for three people than one of those persons must find alternate transportation.

And clearly in the company of seven women, HungryMan is the odd man out.

Now he was not a man without options. We have another car, and we had two sets of neighbors that were driving to the same lake that very same evening. With five extra seatbelts between the pair, he could have found seat among them.

“I’ll just ride on the floor,” he announced the night before we were going to leave.

“What? No.”

I dismissed the comment as ludicrouse. Who in 2008 would ride in a motor vehicle on the highway without being properly restrained to the seat.

As the evening wore on it became increasingly apparent that he truly did intend to ride on the floor.

“Dude, no. This is ridiculous. You can’t possibly ride on the floor.”

We began a three-way debate and I was in the losing corner.

“Rachel, it’s not that big of a deal,” Heather said, revealing the subtle shades of her rebel nature. Well, sure it’s not that big of a deal for you. It’s not your husband.

“It’s…Against the law,” I declared throwing down my trump card.

HungryMan grinned at me as he pulled out the laptop and looked it up. Even the State of Minnesota wouldn’t back me up. Apparently, it’s not against the law to ride unrestrained in a van if there isn’t enough seatbelts to go around.

Twenty-four hours later, I was buckled in along with ever other female in our entourage, while my six-foot-two husband was making a bed for himself in the narrow passage from the backseat bench to the front center console.

For the next three hours he played steward passing out pretzels and juice boxes while adjusting air vents and fluffing pillows, all the while ignoring the frequent gasps and sighs from the front right corner of the van.

We all arrived at our destination with the proper number of appendages, much to the delight of HungryMan. Though my neck remained locked and in the upright position for the remainder of the night.

Now I know that HungryMan is crazy, which was confirmed the next morning when he announced that he wanted to swing tarzan-style thirty feet from the second story deck into the lake.

The lake that is only about three feet deep at the beginning of the dock.

And Heather, as the daughter of the javalina hunter, has a high tolerance for risk, but come on, there has to be one sane person in my family. Not one person at the cabin was the least bit surprised or even concerned that HungryMan had traveled unbuckled across two states. Not one.

Seriously people, did anyone out there see the crash test dummies? Am I the only one that believes in seatbelts?