Americans love driving and cars and road trips.
I am no different. While I don’t go crazy over the cars themselves, I love road
trips. As I get older I can’t go the great distances in a single non-stop
stretch so I may enjoy the road trip even more because I do have to stop every
couple of hours or more to stretch. Those stops make me look around a little
more. I see trees that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. I stop at rest areas
and observe people (I love to watch people), sometimes talking to them and
finding out a little bit about them.
The reason I started realizing I love road
trips is because I just went to Boise and back over an extended weekend. That’s
a road trip I frequently take and therefore take for granted, but I shouldn’t
because Idaho is beautiful. The trip was for the purpose of state cross country
and I extended the sty after the meet to celebrate my youngest son’s 23rd
birthday. Every road trip has a purpose, so sometimes you forget to enjoy the
drive but I’m not doing that so much anymore.
Road trips are a thing I’ve don all of my life.
My parents took me on a road trip to North Carolina from Idaho when I was six
months old. I obviously remember none of it. We came back to Idaho when I was
three and I don’t remember that road trip either, but that’s probably when I
began to view road trips as part of life.
When I was 23 I went on my first cross country
road trip, travelling from Idaho to Vermont across the interstate highway
system. I saw the Badlands of North Dakota for the first time. I watched the
sunset over the Missouri River in Bismarck and was amazed at the extreme beauty
of the Great Plains. I saw fields of fireflies in Illinois that looked like
Tinker Bell had just sprinkled pixie dust over them. I never remember seeing
such a sight before or since. I learned that Pennsylvania really is a vast
expanse of forested land and I actually fell in love with a part of the country
that I had previously thought over populated. The Green Mountains of Vermont
are beautiful and Vermont is every bit as rural as Idaho.
A couple of years later I did another road trip
to Vermont and New England with my wife. We saw the Great Lakes for the first
time together. We camped in Quebec. We walked through Manhattan holding hands,
terrified of being separated, then explored the Museum of Modern Art and the
heights of the Empire State building.
In this century I took my family to England
where we rented a car and drove to Italy and back. We ferried the English Channel
to drive through fields of sunflowers in France. We boated in Venice. We rode a
cogwheel train to the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland. We learned how fortunate we
are to live in America where people adhere to traffic laws!
Of course, there are countless road trips we do every year. Trips to Boise. Trips to Seattle. Trips through Montana to eastern Idaho. Trips to Oregon to see family. They all have their own stories of bonding, of wild weather, of beauty, of monotony. I love road trips and I have never really thought of it much before, but I’m fortunate to have the chance to drive the open road.
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