“Mom, have you ever been so bored that when you look out of the car window and stare up at the clouds you see Massachusetts?” – Spencer, age 13
Did I mention I hate road trips? Anyone who has been in a car with me for over an hour is well aware. To road trip with me is to love me. No, seriously you must love me or at least like me a lot because it is the only way I can be assured you won’t push me out of the vehicle barreling down the highway (threats have been made).
I blame my parents. Don’t we all. What happened you ask? Were my parents gypsy’s that traveled from place to place grifting innocent townspeople? Or, did they lock me in the trunk to keep me from telling the police who they really were and what they were really carrying in their luggage? No, it was so much worse.
They took me to Iowa.
I know. Awful, right? Take a moment to collect yourself.
Year after year of 22-hour car trips with my poor father searching for some secret passageway to get us there without going through Indiana. Love the Hoosiers but driving through Indiana is like being stuck in the lobotomized mind of the most boring person in the world.
When I have kids, we will fly everywhere and visit only exotic locations in foreign lands is the promise I made to my teenage self. Actually, I probably just made several loud sighs and rolled my eyes but you get the gist.
The funny thing is when I look back now as an adult and as a parent I can’t recall what was so awful (except the drive through Indiana nothing to be done about that).
In fact, as it turns out those road trips actually helped shaped many parts of who I am today and taught a few valuable lessons.
I learned boredom is simply a circumstance and that with imagination there is no circumstance in which one is bored.
Road trips helped to cultivate my ferocious love of books and why still today I look forward to vacations simply for the luxury of uninterrupted reading.
I learned everyone has a story and every story is interesting if you just listen. Like the farmers talking about their crops or town politics while having coffee on a rainy morning at The Little Red Hen House restaurant just outside of Indiana.
I learned to have a conversation. In case, you aren’t aware teenage girls talk, a lot. Much like a predator needs prey to define them a teenage girl needs to talk. So, with only my parents to talk to and my very existence on the line I did the unthinkable – spoke to my parents. With equal interest, we talked about Barbies, my favorite music groups, politics, social matters, and how much we hated driving through Indiana. We talked to each other not as parent to child but as people and from that I learned the difference between talking and having a conversation.
Perhaps, traveling with my husband and children I will learn that life is so much more than the destination but what you experience along the way and come to love road trips.
I won’t lie there are still moments that I look out the car window and stare up at the clouds and see Massachusetts but if you think about it taking a moment to stop, look to the sky, and imagine seems pretty worthwhile to me.
Until next time Happy Camping.
Boondock Adventures 
So fun to read this and remember all the road trips we took each summer with my parents through the back roads and small towns of SC, NC, VA, WV, TN (not Indiana, thank heavens!). The drive itself was both our joy and our frustration. We played endless games of H.O.R.S.E. (the verbal spelling version…) I know Spence and Dillan would just LOVE it! My brother Charles did (not!). Call for the rules if you’d like to add a little more competition to the back seat. (I’m guessing I won’t hear from you on that offer…)
And there was our other favorite game: “Cows in the Graveyard” This one I think my mother just made up out of sheer desperation for something to do from the back seat because NO ONE else I know has ever heard of this arcane game and its rather arbitrary rules… which my brother Charles (did I mention him…?) tried to cheat at constantly, but which my mother arbitrated fairly and firmly. I don’t recall who won that game the most often.
But I can still see in my mind’s eye the endless patches of cows grazing across the miles of open fields on “my side” of the car, and the sighting of the “dreaded” graveyards that popped up in the small towns causing me to have to start counting all over again. Damn those graveyards… enemies of cows! Who knew?!
Best of all, I can still picture my mother’s face and her beautiful smile. And I can still hear her laughter ringing clearly in my head when she was called upon to arbitrate another cow-count battle between me and Charles, That was 50 years ago. Or was it just yesterday?
You’re doing the right thing. Remember that when all you can see in your head is Massachusetts. (Which would make a great word for the H.O.R.S.E game… I’m just sayin’.)
Anne.