A Love Letter To Road Trips

It’s 2AM when the alarm starts singing its obnoxious song. I swore I’d be in bed early, just like every other time. I wasn’t- also just like every other time. But no matter, there is coffee somewhere down the road, and our trip depends on getting the hell out of New Jersey before everybody wakes up and gets in the way.

The turnaround point of today’s Iron Ass Marathon is Toledo. Just a quick 1200-mile jaunt, because thanks to the glory of the internet I know that there is a pair of axles that will fit the car we’re building, and also possibly because we’re a little, tiny bit insane. The insanity isn’t necessarily driving 590 miles for a car part- my baby is a 31-year-old foreign car, and by that standard, Toledo is one of the more convenient places to go for parts- but in the detour to Ithaca for the return trip.

What? Waterfalls are pretty.

I’m not really sure where it started. When I was a kid, we lived in a small town with a lot of nothing around it. Gas was cheap, air conditioning was expensive, and my parents’ solution to hot summer afternoons was to pile us in the back of a pickup truck, enjoy the “2x40 air conditioning” — roll down two windows, drive 40mph — and at least half the time the destination involved some nearby river or brisk mountain stream to swim in, or, if we were really lucky and relatively flush that week, an ice cream stand. The rules were simple; never come home the way you drove out and don’t take the highway if you don’t have to. My father taught us the three P’s of civilization: power lines, pavement and package stores. We go to lots of places that have none of them, and even more that have just one of the three.

Even earlier than that, family legend has it that my parents, in an effort to encourage me to quit overstaying my welcome in my mother’s uterus, took the Jeep out down some of the old mountain trails to bounce me out when I was a week overdue. I’m not 100% convinced that this is true, but I like to blame them every once in a while for my permanent wanderlust and they’ve never argued with it.

Fast forward to my early 20s, when I have a colicky baby who sleeps in a car seat as long as the car remains in motion. Gas is cheap again, and besides that I have a tiny underpowered sedan that costs $14 to fill and has a working stereo, so I invent naptime errands. When I run out of plausible errands, I invent scenic tours.

My sister and I drive out to Worcester for the family Christmas for the first time by ourselves, and meet my parents there. Neither of us are 100% certain that we have any idea where we are or what we’re doing until we crest a particular hill, then turn to each other and say “Isn’t there a yellow package store over the next hill?” There is, and we turn right at the next road, and pull triumphantly up to my aunt and uncle’s house without maps or need for rescue.

I move half an hour away to a more settled area, and make a concerted effort to learn more of the back roads. This is the journaled era. Pages and pages of road names and mileage counts without further description, but in my mind’s eye, each trip lays a tiny, glowing, gossamer strand, sinking into the earth, the asphalt, the mountains and valleys, binding me to the land. This glowing web, woven across the Berkshires, the Pioneer Valley, the remoter corners of Worcester and Hamden Counties, and growing into southern Vermont, still remains and whenever I am home I glide across it effortlessly, and it restores and grounds me.

The second baby does not sleep automagically in car seats, but she is amiable when awake and born addicted to g-forces. The first is not colicky any more, and now he is old enough to do adventurous things. We go to the park and the dinosaur footprints and the ponds and the museums and the restaurants that hand the toys out the window. My father expresses concern about his “gypsy” grandchildren to the child who slept half the weekends of her childhood on an ancient sleeping bag in the back of a pickup truck.

I start looking for any excuse for a road trip. Party on the other side of the (fun sized) state? Why not. Friend needs a ride to graduation? ON IT. Friend needs a co-driver to get a new-to-her car from Baltimore to Denver with her 4-month-old in tow? Free cross country trip in exchange for amateur nanny services, sign me up. Internet friends become destinations.

I become a Car Person by way of a romantic attachment, and discover a vintage Travel Guide that predates the interstate. We spend some time tracing old roadways in a car that also predates the interstate. My repertoire expands to include southern New England, though my gossamer web never did stick there. I keep the book when we part ways.

Later, I meet a nice boy whose idea of a good time is to find something interesting within a few hours and drive there. I sit cross-legged in the passenger seat, armed with a toy laser blaster, and vaporize bad drivers. Occasionally we follow the advice of a British accented navigation unit, but she’s not terribly sensible and slow to catch up to unexpected turns, so it is largely an old-school affair, with paper maps spread across my lap. We teach the children to read them, and invent our own set of rules:

· No interstates, unless it is a city bypass and there’s nothing interesting in said city

· No chain restaurants.

· Neon never lies.

We fall in love with Burlington, an entirely reasonable 3ish hours from home, and more gossamer webs land in the western edge of Vermont, and stick again. I drive the Mt. Washington Auto Road as a farewell salute to my purple sedan, who was both lesbian and German tourist, and ran on several occasions when it should not have been mechanically possible- but only if I was driving. For anyone else, she would break down at the slightest provocation. She has grudgingly accepted the repairs that the nice boy has made and wears her new bumper sticker with what I imagine to be pride.

For our honeymoon, we drive the entirety of coastal US-1 through Maine, through Calais into Canada, and gawp at the coastal fog and the extremely distinctive phallic rock at Hopewell Rocks, then flip a coin to decide between the Gaspé Peninsula and Nova Scotia / PEI before the peninsula wins by virtue of unpreparedness- we have no Canadian cash to cross the bridge. We hit the top of Baie des Chaleurs in the middle of a July thunderstorm and I marvel at the idea that you can swim north of the freezing Maine waters I grew up with.

Later still, I am in New Jersey, in the vast yellow blob that is the New York metro area, and we are too poor for air conditioning but conveniently possessed of cars that it is — miracle of miracles- my husband’s job to drive aimlessly, and we are a mere 60 miles from the beach and the alien landscape of the Pine Barrens, and once you are there, well, that’s practically all the way to Atlantic City where you can drive on the beaches, and Philadelphia, and Cape May. Gas is not cheap, but it is sometimes paid for if I sit in my passenger seat lotus with a clunky laptop and monitor the car’s electronic brains.

When we are finally both possessed of vacation time AND spare money for real vacations, it is only within our means if they are by car. The first is a combination business trip and vacation, from New Jersey to Michigan, in the middle of the winter- see the aforementioned insanity. We leave at o-dark-thirty, with the intention of getting the suffering that is I-80 across Pennsylvania out of the way. Now we are starting to refine our technique: leave before there is traffic. Pack the basic food groups: a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, some kind of shelf-stable meat, and fresh fruit. Budget for convenience store stops anyway, because they are both a welcome distraction and a bathroom stop. Fast food, while still off limits under the “no chain” rule, is an excellent source of clean and relatively ubiquitous restrooms- no purchase required.

It is now possible to carry the internet in your pants, so side trips can be scouted by proximity- but if there’s no signal, we fall back on the tried and true method of reading signs. Again, there are refinements. Diners are almost guaranteed to produce edible food, if you can find one outside the Northeast. Stop for dinner during the Old People Dinner Hour, when restaurants are not full and you don’t run the risk of getting everyone’s hopes up for hot food only to find out there’s a 2h wait for a table and the next town is an hour out. Do not, under any circumstances, get the turkey and mashed potatoes if it is late and you are already tired.

As a corollary to neon’s guiding star, anything with hand-painted signs announcing its superlatives — or comparing it to a more famous tourist destination- is probably worth checking out. If there is a trainyard or a waterfall, at least ¾ of the car is interested so we might as well. If the pants-based internet is working, searching for “best [food item] in [town]” will get you dinner and adventure. I become an expert at skimming reviews to determine their merit. This, combined with a drive-by assessment, gets us close to 90% deliciousness. Not too shabby, even if the deliciousness rating goes up relative to everyone’s desire to get the hell out of the car for an hour.

The states start to tick off.

Tennessee, leaving at 2AM so that we can be on top of Skyline Drive at sunrise. And, since we’re “almost” there, Atlanta, to visit a college friend and see the whale sharks. It is the week after the April tornadoes, and we drive around southeastern TN and northern Alabama marveling at the tracks.

Michigan again, but all the way to the upper peninsula this time, ticking the last two Great Lakes off my “must see” list and driving straight through in increasingly short shifts as we pound Red Bull for the first time to make up for two lost travel days and the only more interminable way to cross PA than I-80, US-6.

Florida, where I drove for 22 hours straight then punted on the last 5 hours, waving the white flag and getting a hotel thanks to the recently improved ability to afford them. Within an hour of meeting up with the gang of equally-crazy people we’re helping in an amateur road race, we are back in the car to hit the very tip of Key West. I celebrate by posting pictures of Key West and Calais to the Book of Faces.

More car parts, just outside of Toronto this time, and while we’re there we might as well go find my family’s ancestral farm on the Bruce peninsula, drive across the top of the lake, and come back into the US at the Thousand Islands crossing because it’s prettier than Buffalo[1].

Random loops through the Catskills, junkyard-centric tours of Pennsylvania, every single back way into New England to avoid I-84, Maryland via the ferry for a vintage couch, Provincetown in mid-winter for the Army-Navy store (and Chatham for soup on the way back), junkets to south Jersey on the barest of pretexts, Lawn Guyland where I stomp around the Hamptons in a plaid silk formal skirt and combat boots like a gleeful pirate queen.

Real vacations again: to the Outer Banks for a week over New Year’s, where we realize that we have now driven the east coast enough times to have a “favorite” way to go and thrift stores that we’ve visited more than twice. To Bar Harbor, for lobster bisque and Moxie. The babies are teenagers hiding behind electronics, but now there are two dogs- one aging veteran of the road trip, blind and content to sleep all day as long as he has the high ground, and one very enthusiastic cow-spotted and dim-witted puppy with a pathological fear of rumble strips.

Suddenly, we are relocated away from the vast, glorious mood swing that is the Atlantic coast to a flat, mitten-shaped peninsula that, within a week of arrival, has caused all of us to say “Wait, haven’t we been here before?” at some random intersection. The biggest perks cited are the reduced cost of living- which, really, you can get moving from New Jersey to almost literally anywhere else- and the fact that we don’t have to drive through Pennsylvania to get anywhere interesting any more.

A short while later, another unexpected perk emerges: not nearly as many people think we are crazy for our love of the road trip. I hope that you understand too, after reading.

-Frankie

[1] Isn’t everything, pretty much?