For two months, I have thought about this trip. Strike that – for almost 20 years I have thought about this trip, ever since I realized that Generation Dad feels about the Pacific Northwest the way I feel about the Northeast. Once upon a time, back when we were in our early 20s and just married, we hatched this plan to move to northern California. We were going to pack the equivalent of hobo sacks into our tiny cars and drive from Florida to Eureka, Calif., camping along the way. I even bought a pair of shorts* for this road trip, so you know it was serious.
*Real, actual shorts. The kind that reveal portions of one’s leg above the knee and are not to be worn fashionably with a pair of opaque black tights.
This trip has not been anything like the trip I envisioned. Not one bit.
When I’ve been telling people what we’re doing – driving across country with the three kids, three dogs, a cat and a 26-foot moving truck, the universal response has been a wide-eyed, horrified “Whew – well, it will be an adventure!”
And it has been. It has been exactly the sort of life-altering
adventure that a trip across the country should be.
We started a day late. Or two days late, depending on how you look at it. After spending three days loading the truck, we piled into our vehicles, buckled up and … Nothing. The truck’s battery was dead. It was already dark, so we ordered Chinese food and camped out in our living room for another night.
Nothing has really gone according to plan. The drive has taken longer. Unexpected things have cropped up.
But it has been a good trip. We have seen the country. We chased the sunset through Illinois. We cursed the Iowa/South Dakota border and its easily missable exits. We cruised through twilight over the snow-covered moonscape of the badlands.
Today, we are taking the kids to Mount Rushmore, where we will line them up for a family photo to send out as a Christmas card. What a sweetly conventional, normal family thing to do. I think this will be the first time we have done such a thing. Our first family holiday card. Generation Dad is right – it’s a brand new life, full of things we haven’t tried before. If this journey is any indication, it will be beautiful and scary and unexpected and will come at you from new directions with a minifridge in the room.
