Friendly Road Trips
Life is cyclical. Sometimes you're busier than busy and sometimes it feels like you're almost dormant. The last couple of weeks I've lived the former which is why I haven't written for awhile, so forgive the delay and let's get on to today's blog post. Road trips!
Not all road trips are fun. I've been on many a travels where fun wasn't even part of the equation. There was the exciting voyage I embarked on as a seventeen-year-old with my mom and grandmother to visit my brother in Florida. As a senior in high school, I'd rather have gone on my senior trip with my friends. My mom, however, as she was extracting the money from my bank account (money I had earned and saved for said senior trip), thought her idea of a senior trip ( on a trip with two seniors) sounded much more fun. Maybe that's why I taught Dante's Inferno so much. I lived it on this delightful adventure. Who wouldn't want, as a 17, to give up a trip to New York and Washington, D.C. with peers, to instead travel to Florida in a smoke-filled car with two people who didn't really like each other? I think I've said enough about this nightmarish trip from hell.
Another kind of excursion I've taken is the happy/sad trip. Here the point of the trip usually involves death or dying, so the emphasis isn't on happiness. I took one of these once from ND to WI when my husband's paternal grandma passed away. We were ebullient one minute and crying for her loss the next. And both emotions were totally appropriate and honoring.
Then there's the destination road trip. Living in North Dakota almost everywhere I go involves a road trip. So of all the different kinds of road trips there are, this is the most abundant. At least in my book. I went on a road trip this summer to visit Banff up in Canada. Preparing for this kind of expedition involves much planning and thought. What would the weather be like? Will it snow? Rain? (It did both.) How much, if any, snacks should we take? Should we change money in the States? And so on. My husband thinks I become twitterpated before a big trip. I disagree. I'm only trying to do my best imitation of a girl or boy scout--always be prepared.
Then there's the road trip I took recently with my two older sisters. They were gracious enough to make the first leg of the journey just to get here Then we packed up in the car for another three and a half hour drive west.The milestone event we were attending was just that, a milestone. But the trip became a memory-maker in its own right. The older I get, the older my sisters get. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that you can't have too many memories--especially with your sisters.
I waited, in vain, for a few more witty words about the fun of traveling with your two sisters ... memories made, stories shared, ailments discussed, medications being taken, etc., etc., etc. I mean, come on, surely you could come up with just a few anecdotal stories about the joys of traveling with your sisters. Something that could make the relationship come alive in the eyes of your readers. You could have talked about your oldest sister, who has a few physical ailments that cause her to move more slowly than a turtle, even with a cane, but who was able to leap with reckless abandon out of a car when it was about to be demolished by a train. Or about how your middle sister assisted your oldest sister out of the car with a massive push so she could drive across the train tracks and avoid getting hit by the train. I mean, even though that happened a few years ago, it's still funny, right? Okay, whatever. Apparently you can only get so much mileage out of some stories. I'm beginning to think we need to come up with some new material. Clearly, more road trips are in order.
ReplyDeleteFodder for another blog.
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