The road is life...

"The road is life" – Kerouac

I basically grew up in the backseat. My parents and I would take road trips, halfway across the country just to see family for a few days and then turn around and go back home. Sometimes the trip was longer than the time we spent where we were going. I’ve seen most of the mainland fly by, on the other side of the glass. We never stopped for long. Just long enough to use the bathroom, fill up with gas, do some stretches and then climb back in the car. We rarely even bought food. We always had a cooler full of pb&j’s and cheap sodas along with a bag full of pork rinds, apples and whatever random Little Debbies we had. I learned how to maneuver the seatbelt – without unbuckling – and lay down in the backseat…if there wasn’t a wayward Sailor, heading South for the holidays, sharing my space. 

The reason we traveled so much was because my dad was in the Navy. The first long roadtrip I remember was from our house in West Tennessee to Maine in a Uhaul when I was five. We pulled our red ’66 Beetle behind us. I had never been out of the state. I remember saying goodbye to Tennessee, going over a lot of bridges, seeing mountains and the most vivid memory was seeing New York. We went right through Brooklyn. Those tall buildings were a HUGE shock to a little country girl like me. I was in awe the whole trip. 

We did so many back and forth trips from Maine to Tennessee over the next few years, I can’t count them. I always focused on what I saw out the window. The beauty of ever-changing landscapes and seasons. It wasn’t until we moved to Louisiana when I was in third grade that I started noticing people at the places we stopped. It was the mid 80's…the oil business in Texas took a huge hit as our nation had become more dependent on foreign oil during the Reagan Administration. I remember seeing whole families sleeping in their cars at rest areas, because they no longer had homes. Women in tears asking my mom for money in bathrooms. I didn’t understand what was going on. This wasn’t just a random occurrence…it became normal on our trips. We didn’t have a lot of money. Dad was enlisted and my mom worked in the deli at the Commissary. We would pack extra sandwiches and sodas to take on our trips to Tennessee, so we could give them to people. 

Those trips were not only depressing…they were also boring and the landscape flat. I always got really excited when we reached the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge. Eventhough the landscape, aside from the buildings, was still flat – there was something about being in Tennessee that finally made the trip a lot sweeter! 

I continued my love of road trips into my 20’s. The longest one I took was from Maine to Tennessee to Oklahoma to New Mexico to Northern California….by way of Las Vegas. It was a great trip. If it wouldn’t have been the last "let’s try to save our marriage" trip with my ex-husband I would have had a lot more fun! That was my last long road trip. I’ve done a few Tennessee to Florida since then but that’s it. I have to pass through more states than just Georgia to truly satisfy my travel urges...