Ah, the good ‘ole American road trip. Nothing makes you feel more alive and in touch with your roots than cramming more stuff in your car than you could use in a year. You set off down the highway in a vehicle so unbalanced that a ladybug fluttering at you aggressively could tip it over. And before you make it two blocks, you realize you forgot your wallet, your toothbrush and maybe even your child.
Two blocks and you’re already heading back home.
Yes, it’s the greatest of experiences. Your back aches. The coffee is usually bad. Most of the hundreds of miles you see are entirely unremarkable, aside from the occasional billboards for “adult stores” that truckers frequent and you have to explain to your child why people like us don’t go there. Luckily, my child is now 15, which means she has zero interest in looking out the window. She has an iPhone and a Kindle that she watches simultaneously, and I spend most of the trip yelling: “Those are going to rot your brain. Now look out the window and count the garbage!”
Only, she has her AirPods in and can’t hear a thing I’m saying.
The summer road trip is a special thing. A family bonding experience.
When else do you have a chance to say things like, “Hey guys, come look. There’s a pack of wild turkeys. It’s pretty amazing, and also a little scary. I think one of them has a switchblade. Maybe we should run!”
Ah, city-folk on a road trip into the wilds. The mountains. For us, up to the mountains of North Carolina. And along the Shenandoah in Virginia. Roughing it, like the olden days. Like our ancestors did. In Airbnbs! Primitive ones. You should have seen the dishwasher in one we stayed at. So old, it had a hand crank. These wilds are really testing us. Seeing what we’re made of. Once or twice, I even had to hand-wash some dishes. My hands will never be the same.
We’ve also been traveling with the dog. It makes things all the more complex and difficult. Especially when you climb in to the car the first morning and wonder what it was she ate to produce the kind of breath that is causing the window tinting to peel away.
Oh, but she has such a good time. Hiking the mountain trails, bounding through streams and getting in touch with her wild side.
There’s so much to take in. To enjoy. The mountain roads. The deer. The fireflies lighting up the countryside like Christmas lights. The horrific grinding sound of the cargo hitch as it bottoms out on a steep gas station driveway. It sounds like heavy machinery mining for gemstones. Like I’ve torn the back end off the car. My daughter hears this. Half the zip code hears this. And I start to wonder why I enjoy these trips so much. Why we didn’t fly. Why I loaded so much dang stuff back there that the front wheels haven’t touched the pavement in 200 miles.
There are two types of people who take road trips: Those who see them as a means to an end. Who barrel through them as quickly as they can, tuning out the world as they pass. Catching only glimpses and pieces as they go. Desperate to be free of their car, where they are strapped in with a family that keeps asking annoying things like: “Hey dad, why is the water at the bottom of the Port-O-Let blue?” “Honey, why did we stop at a Port-O-Let when could have gone to this visitor center and avoided typhoid?” or “Please tell me the next house has a crank-free dishwasher!”
And then there are those who drink up every minute of it, even the bad ones. Who see this as a chance to be free, and escape the bonds that hold them all year. To take whatever path they choose, no matter how much Google Maps tries to route you to a faster, more direct way. To search out mountain streams and waterfalls and packs of marauding wild turkeys who will probably steal the cargo carrier off of the car. But they don’t care. They forgot their wallet and toothbrush at home, but it still can’t dull the experience. The liberation. The sense of adventure. The family bonding, which happens even with AirPods.
Nothing makes you feel more alive and in touch with your roots than a road trip. And if the unbalanced car with more stuff than you could use in a year doesn’t tip over, even better.