A
Long Longing for the Road
THE
TRIP
– Day 0
Sometime
during the summer after my freshman year of college, my roommate
called to tell me her eldest brother had arrived home. Would I like
to go out to a local bar, meet him and hear about his road trip
through the west? “Home” for me and my roommate was the east
coast - Long Island, New York. As college students, we had ventured
as far as a campus in the foothills of the Catskills upstate, a
whopping 100 miles due west from where we grew up. In a country
2,600+ miles wide, this was not the least bit impressive, but, hey,
we were New Yorkers.* Her brother, however, had ventured as far as
Ohio for his college years, and then headed west, taking the classic
cross country road trip with some friends. Sure, I said, I'd love to
meet your brother and hear about his travels. The year was 1972, and
“going cross country” had been a cool thing for college students
to do between school and work for the past decade or more. I spent
the evening listening with rapt attention to my roommate's brother
tell of the wonders he had seen on his trip, the national parks he
visited, the landscapes he had scene along the road, the people he
had met. As I listened, I could hear the line from “America”,
Paul Simon's iconic road trip song playing in my head (“They've all
come to look for America, all come to look for America...”). I
don't now remember the specific details of everywhere my roommate's
brother went or what he saw, but I do remember saying to myself “I'm
going to do that someday, too. I'm going to drive west across the
country...”
Post-college
years and marriage took me as far west as Rochester, New York and
eventually as far as northern Illinois. Yearly trips back east to
visit family made us familiar with the concept of road trip in a
small way. But going east 800 miles - two adults, three kids, a
mini-van - it just didn't seem to line up with my vision of “going
cross country”. Maybe when the kids were older, maybe when they
were in college, maybe “someday”...
“Someday”
first showed its face during a trip back east a year or so ago.
After the usual family visits in New York, we drove down the coast,
through Virginia, to visit our son who was then living in North
Carolina. We returned by way of South Carolina, Tennessee and
Kentucky, states neither my husband nor I had been through before. I
loved being on the road, seeing the Shenandoah Valley, the Great
Smoky Mountains, going through Knoxville, Nashville, Paducah.
Wouldn't it be fun to do this when we retire, to take a road trip and
see parts of the country we've never seen before, I said. My husband
groaned. Sounds like a lot of driving, he said. (For me, it's
always been about the journey. For him, it's about the
destination...) But he didn't say “no”. This past Christmas he
wrapped several books on the national parks he had checked out of the
library and gave them to me as a token of the promise of a trip to
“some” national parks when we both retired the following year. I
started making a mental list of the places I wanted to see. A few
days later, a young friend got engaged. He would be getting married
in California in June. Would we come to his wedding? The bride
lived a stone's throw from Yosemite, one of the parks on my mental
list. And there were lots of national parks between Chicagoland and
San Jose, California, lots of roads to travel to get from here to
there, all heading west. “Someday” had finally arrived...
*For
a New Yorker's perspective on the geography of this country, see: http://brilliantmaps.com/new-yorkers-world/ Yes, the country really
does look like that to many living east of the Hudson River...
Next:
God
and Expedia are My Friends:
Planning,
Planning, Praying...
THE
TRIP – Day 0.1
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