Road Trips

Road Trips

I have always loved road trips.  I love getting ready for them.  I love going to AAA to get my triptiks and my state books.  I love going online to check out the local attractions along the way.  I even enjoy packing up all the stuff we need and figuring out how to, most efficiently, jam it in the car.  I cannot sleep the night before a road trip.  Too many things to think about:  Make sure the water is turned off to the washing machine.  Did we stop the mail and the paper?  What are we forgetting?

As young parents, our road trips had to do with the required summer visits to Pennsylvania. We couldn’t afford four airline tickets, so the Subaru station wagon was our vehicle of choice to make the 1,500-mile trek.  While Big Run, PA has never been very high up on anyone’s “most exciting vacations” list; it was our yearly vacation destination.  These trips meant that our parents could enjoy their grandkids and vice versa.  Great memories were made.

Road trips with small kids meant leaving in the middle of the night, so they would sleep through part of the first day on the road.  We would stop in the late afternoon at a hotel that had a pool, so the boys could burn off some energy.  Then, after a good night sleep, we continued our journey the next day.  Frequent stops at places that advertised the world’s tallest prairie dog or a scenic overlook at a meteor crater provided diversion and/or an educational experience.

As the kids got older, many of our road trips involved family vacations.  We traveled interstates that took us to the beaches of North Carolina and to the deserts of Arizona, where we met other family members on their own road trips.  Road trips with teenagers were easier.  They entertained themselves with their headsets and their hand held electronic games.  A memorable vacation was to Disney World.  It was a long trip and we forged ahead, on a mission, savoring the expectation of a week at the best vacation spot in the world.  The return trip was a little more subdued.  What a sight we must have been as we piled out of that car and into that restaurant in Georgia, all decked out in our Mickey attire.  The waitress had the nerve to ask us if we were going to or coming back from Orlando.

When the boys were in high school and college, baseball required road trips to destinations in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nebraska, Kansas, and South Dakota with other baseball families.  One of the eeriest sites was Roswell, NM.  The trip itself involved a seemingly never-ending barren landscape.  I swear we didn’t see a town, a building, or a sole for at least 100 miles.  Dirt roads off the main route stretched for miles, seemingly leading to nowhere.  At the end of this boring drive, we found the town of Roswell, which, to me, exudes a sense of “strangeness.”  Maybe this has to do with the fact that Roswell was supposedly the location of an alien crash in the late 1940s.  According to accounts, the spacecraft and the aliens within were recovered, but the government confiscated the evidence and covered up the incident.

Now, Roswell uses its alien encounter to entice the curious and/or the hard-core believers in extraterrestrial beings to visit its alien museums.  Stranger than the cheesy papier mache exhibits in the museums are the people who visit this place.  Some actually come dressed like green Martians or Star Trek rejects.

Now that we are “empty-nesters,” we don’t take as many road trips.  It’s easier to fly.  But, when we do, our travel revolves around rush hours in the cities along the route.  For example, it is approximately 616 miles from Denver to Kansas City and it takes approximately 12 hours.  This includes pit stops and fast food lunch.  Therefore, factoring in the one-hour time change, you must leave Denver by 3 AM so you are ahead of the 4 – 6 PM rush hour.  We stay at hotels that have a 4 or 5 star AAA rating.  We don’t care if it has a pool, as long as it has a full service bar and a continental breakfast.

We have been to some incredible places. We have witnessed beautiful sunrises and sunsets; tornadoes and snowstorms.  Driving through hot barren deserts in Arizona and New Mexico or through the humid lush green Deep South, our road trips have provided opportunities to see just how geographically and historically diverse and rich our country is.

On car trips through the southwest, we have seen mysterious and mystic Mesa Verde, the awesome Grand Canyon, the beautiful Painted Desert, saguaro cacti, the Sonora Desert, Monument Valley, and the ghosts of Spanish conquistadores and cowboys of the Old West in places like Santa Fe or Tucson. 

Driving across the mid section of our country, we have experienced the vastness of Nebraska cornfields; the architectural wonder that is the St. Louis Arch, and crossing over Old Man River. 

The Eastern part of our country offered up historic locations such as Washington, D.C. with all its museums and monuments; George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Gettysburg’s Battlefields, lighthouses on historic Atlantic Shores, Niagara Falls, Philadelphia and the Liberty Bell, and antebellum plantations in South Carolina. 

Road trips have provided shared experiences that air travel, bus travel, or rail travel cannot provide. They equal excitement, amazement, and enrichment.  They also equal exhaustion.  For at the end of the road trip is home, where we renew and reflect and relive what we experience.  I look forward to future adventures on the road.  There is so much out there still to see.