Road Trip



My mother was born with the travel gene. It lay dormant until she was a young married woman, 21 years old, and my father was drafted into military service at the beginning of WWII. My mother, still living with her mother, worked as a secretary in a law firm in Charleston until my father, now an infantryman, received orders to deploy for Camp Adair in Albany, Oregon. My mother decided to make the long train trip across the country to work, again as a secretary, on the military base. She later followed him to Camp Pendleton in Olympia, Washington, and then back to Ft. Leonard Wood in Rolla, Missouri until he was sent overseas.

When the war was over, I came along. My mother was lucky to have her mother still living with her and my father, so she continued to work after I was born. But the travel gene, activated in those years when she followed my father around the country, refused to go dormant. She wanted the honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls that the war had stolen from them, so the first trip I remember, mostly from photographs taken where I am unrecognizable, looking somewhat like a penguin, in a huge slicker on the deck of a boat, The Maid of the Mist, about to go under Niagara Falls and another photo where I am standing in front of the tourist home where we stayed, uncomfortably posed in a sailor hat and short dress holding a Canadian flag. Then, I suppose we went home. But the travel gene had not gone back into hibernation, and my mother, who never liked the mountains and never liked the cold winters, had her heart set on Florida sunshine, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and the beach. Thus, I do remember being wrapped in blankets in the dark of night, placed in the back seat of the green 1949 Ford, and driven off on a non-stop trip to Daytona Beach. I don't remember how long the trip was but I do remember waking up to an unfamiliar smell, the salt air, watching my father take off my shoes and leave them on the floor of the back seat, and being carried down a series of concrete steps to the beach where the sand was cold and hard and dark and the waves came rushing in again and again and again. I wasn't afraid; I was amazed.

There were more trips to the ocean in my childhood: Daytona Beach, West Palm Beach, Myrtle Beach. I splashed through the waves, hunted for shells, surfed the waves on the raft, and suffered brilliant sunburns despite the Coppertone (I can still smell it) that was slathered all over me. When my parents were awarded more than a week's vacation after being at their jobs for a number of years, my mother's travel gene went on alert and squawked, "Go west, young woman, go west." So we did, to California, where my mother's sister and her husband now had two sons, one older, one younger than I, and were eager to show us all that California had to offer for vacation.

This trip to California was the longest one we had ever taken. My parents had never had a credit card, and they got one for the trip. They'd never had a gasoline card, and they got one with a big ESSO on the front. They went to AAA and got maps of all the states we would pass through and quilted them together on the living room floor so we could plan the trip. "We" being my mother and I. My father sat on the couch and read the sports page. We discovered all the places we could stop along the way: Brookfield Zoo (after we found a church to go to that Sunday morning), Meramec Caverns, birthplaces of famous people, Red Rock Canyon, the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon, and on and on. My mother wanted to make a great circle, more like an ellipse, and take the southern route to LA, then come back by a northern route. So, we could see different things, she said, each side of the trip. My father wanted to get there and get back, the same way, because then he'd be sure what route to take to get us home. We would camp, to save money, and my father was in charge of the heavy canvas tent, the 4 army cots, the 4 suitcases, the cooler, the camp stove, the picnic basket, the groceries, and other incidentals, all of which would go in the trunk of the car, though the cooler did end up under my feet in the back seat. There was more anxiety about the freeways when we got to Los Angeles than there was about crossing through small towns on two lane roads, finding campgrounds, crossing the desert, and arriving on time. We traveled Route 66 with no idea how famous it would become. The trip would take 5 days. We would have a great experience.

As an adult, more than 60 years after making that first cross-country trip, I have to say that the greatest gift my parents gave me as a child was the gift of travel. I had been in 40 states by the time I went to college. I'd hiked in the Grand Canyon, looked at Saturn through the telescope at Mt. Palomar, shopped (but not eaten) in Chinatown, camped in the Black Hills, driven alongside bears in the Smokey Mountains, climbed down and down and down into the World's Largest Hand-Dug Well in Greensburg, Kansas, gathered pecans in South Carolina, wandered through Mark Twain's Hannibal Missouri, and marveled when we drove down the main drag in Las Vegas, Nevada at midnight, constellations of bright light surrounding us, neon signs spelling out exotic destinations. I loved passing through the different landscapes, seeing the hills of the Ozarks flatten into the plains rolling out from Tulsa and Oklahoma City, then going up through the mesas of New Mexico and into the deserts of Arizona and California. I loved the curio shops (genuine Indian arrowheads and real leather cowboy boots), Stuckey's and their pecan pralines, the flashing at night motel signs of Tucumcari: The Blue Swallow, The Silver Saddle, The Broken Arrow, and the Pueblo Inn. I loved the wind blowing through the car (this was before air conditioning), the stops at the Esso stations for ice cold Coca Colas pulled from the dinged and dented cooler by the station door, the lunches eaten at picnic table where, in Kansas, the wind blew so hard and so hot that the bread for our cheese sandwiches was dried before we could get them to our mouths. What did I not love? The sadness of saying goodbye to my cousins. The sense of loss when the trip was over.

I have continued with road trips and camping trips, hikes and bike rides, exploration and discovery throughout my adult life. I have a friend who says, "Open the car door and Anita will get in. It doesn't matter where you're going." It is the journey for me, not necessarily the destination. I drive rather than fly whenever I can (though I may not be alone in that sentiment these days) and I stop for as many quirky side trips along the way that I can. I travel in a 14-year-old Kiwi green Honda Element with 250,000 miles, the best car I have ever owned. It's a great camping car, and I don't know what I'll do when it says, "Sorry. I can't do this anymore. I'm done." Honda has stopped making the Element , hasn't made it for 9 years. My next road trip will come in March when I drive from East Lansing, MI to San Antonio, Texas, with stops in Wichita and Oklahoma City to see family and friends. On the return trip, I'll change course and come back through Iowa City, making an elliptical (somewhat) orbit rather returning home by the same route. In this sense, I am my mother's daughter, and she did pass the travel gene onto me. Late in life, she chose the Caribbean cruise over the road trip, possibly because her eyesight was failing and she rarely drove. But she returned to the ocean, her love of waves and water and sun maintained. There beside her was my father, reading the options on the menu, glad to be sunburn-free and not behind the wheel of a jam-packed station wagon heading west. Again.