Blogocentric Formulations

Road Trips

Prompt for Day 2604: Road Trips. “As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, 'Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.'" — Jack Kerouac, On the Road. What do you think of road trips? Do you have any memories you'd like to share with us?


I spent a lot of time on road trips as a kid. My parents were fishing and camping enthusiasts, and I was active in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts until I turned 18, so it was a common occurrence in our household that we would pack up on a Friday afternoon and head off to some river, lake, etc. or another for a weekend of "roughing it." My parents were also quite frugal, so family vacations were matters of driving a car rather than getting on a plane whenever practicable. Full disclosure, practicable by their definition meant anywhere within driving range of 1-2 days which meant pretty much anywhere in the Western United States was fair game for a road trip.

My favorite road trips as a kid were when my family would drive from Sacramento up to Montana to visit my grandparents for the summer. That was a two-day journey (one to get from Sacramento to the Nevada-Idaho border, then a second day to get from the Nevada-Idaho border to my grandparents' lake house in Western Montana), and even though it was a very long trip those were some of my favorite memories as a kid. The excitement of getting to the lake house for a summer of swimming and playing games and horseback riding and river rafting and eating raspberries, combined with the things my parents did to make the road trip fun: buying us those huge books of crossword puzzles and word searches from the grocery store, along with a handful of books to keep us busy in between rounds of the license plate game, or "I Spy," interrupted only when we had to stop for gas and would load up on junk food at the mini-mart while we were at it.

Those moments (combined with a brutal commute driving through the vast majority of Los Angeles each day for the better part of twenty years) are probably why I find being in the car comforting. Or, if not comforting, at least less stressful than most people seem to. I almost never mind driving somewhere within 2-3 hours (day trip to San Diego or Santa Barbara? Sure, why not!), and I still have a dream of one day driving across the country and stopping at all of the places between this country's West Coast and East Coast.

That said, road trips are not without their troubles, and I have plenty of those stories as well... of being stranded by the side of the road waiting for a tow truck, and having to make the rounds with him as he picked up a bunch of other cars as well. Or just barely making it to a tire shop after realizing that there's a slow-leaking puncture in your tire about a hundred miles into a four hundred mile road trip. But at the risk of going full "dad mode" at this point in my life... those are also the experiences that have built character and given me stories to tell.