The American Road Trip, or How to Make Memories

The American road trip summer vacation. I assume other countries also road trip, but Woody Guthrie was on to something when he sang about America. From the redwood forests, to the Gulfstream waters, there is a lot to see here, and in fact we looked those lyrics up in their entirety on our recent road trip. Driving across the country fuels patriotism.

I think everyone has a road trip story. Childhood is full of road trips. We’re totally dependent at this point. The car is packed, and away we go. If we’re lucky, there are an abundance of snacks to make up for our childhood powerlessness. I have very vivid memories of driving the 9 hours to my grandparents’ house when I was young. It was a different era, so one kid was always rotating into the “way back” of the station wagon, and as such the dynamic up in the front changed a bit, keeping it fresh. I remember a lot of singing (we were that family), and a lot of stories on tape (stories I can still tell today, and that my brothers and I break out lines from like great comedy sketches), and there were those games with the little red vinyl windows where you marked if you saw a cow, a semi, a church…

As adults, we are more in charge of the destination, and thankfully there are still snacks. In college, road trips changed slightly… up to Niagara Falls (Canada side, where the drinking age was lower and we could go OUT), to the Shore, to home and to friends parents’ houses when we needed to be reminded that food didn’t always come in take-out containers or industrial-sized steel vats. As an adult, I drove to and from Colorado from the Eastern Time Zone a few times before moving here for good. My husband proved his mettle with my family while we were still dating by spontaneously driving us the 20 hours from Colorado to Ohio when our Christmas flight was canceled. Our bags were already packed, and what’s 20 hours in a 13-miles-per-gallon Dodge Ram when you’re young and in love?

Spontaneous proofs of commitment notwithstanding, there are two types of road trips. One is the meandering, hells yes, let’s stop at the 60-foot-Jolly-Green-Giant road trip, and the other is the drive-straight-through hyped up on caffeine and possibly an ice bath to the back of the neck when all else fails (this is stupid and dangerous, obviously; never get to this point). When you add children into a road trip equation, the latter option is pretty much off the table. And suddenly, it’s a childhood road trip again, but it’s no longer YOUR childhood road trip. It’s THEIRS. And because you, now the driving, snack-dispensing, responsible adult, remember your childhood road trips, you have the added weight of knowing that you really are MAKING MEMORIES. The great American road trip has begun.

At the risk of sounding old and crotchety, the road trip is totally different for kids ‘these days’ than it was in our childhood. As we packed up for our 2015 trek, we packed books, and crayons and paper and magnetic tangram puzzles, and withheld the kids’ monthly magazine subscriptions until we were on the road. It could have been 1988. But today’s children also have Chrome books and Netflix and mobile hotspots, and since my children are – they will tell you – deprived enough to not have their own cell phones, they have the second-best chorus of, “Can I play on your phone?” More than once, my husband and I said, “When we were kids….” And, much like ourselves as children, I’m sure, we were largely ignored. And yet, somewhere in western Minnesota, my youngest started counting windmills. And then there were too many windmills to count, so she started to count red barns. Road trips are like that, no matter how much technology is along. My husband and I tried to interest the girls in the license plate game, but the highways in eastern South Dakota are long and empty. While they quickly grew bored of checking the one or two cars that passed every 20 minutes, my husband and I doubled down to really invest in it (we got 42/50, including Alaska, plus 5 Canadian provinces, so we kinda rocked it, just saying).

In our non-road trip lives, we live in a suburban metropolis. Because we live next to a park and have a mountain view, I sometimes forget, until I spend some time in rural Minnesota and South Dakota, that we live in a crowded people soup. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we rarely have to go more than 5 minutes to accomplish our daily lives. Sometimes for soccer games it stretches to 15 minutes, but we grumble about that. By deciding to drive 1700 miles in less than a week, we were definitely making a gamble. I should note that I have two very different children. One is, as a friend said in reminding me to be a road trip palm tree (not an oak), energy incarnate. The other is an introspective, contemplative child who processes much more internally, and who, luckily enough, can sleep almost any time she is in a car.

Do you know where Rapid City is located in South Dakota? I’m going to be honest. I did not. I never gave it any thought, even when my husband proposed and planned this road trip. We were in South Dakota when it occurred to me to wonder. It turns out Rapid City is in western South Dakota. Pretty far west. Pretty much across the entire state, if you’re starting from Minnesota. But it also turns out that as soon as you cross the Missouri River (about mid-South Dakota, for those geography buffs), the entire landscape changes. Instead of flat farmland, it becomes green rolling hills and buttes. It’s a change so dramatic that it focuses you on the landscape and, since there aren’t many other vehicles on the road with you, you can’t help but imagine what the change meant to wagon trains 200 years ago. You mean we just lost half our number crossing that river, and now we need enough horses or cattle to ranch? It’s no wonder the allure of gold was so strong (as opposed to today, when the allure of easy money has totally lost its luster).

About the time that the scenery got really picturesque, our oldest woke up car sick from her most recent nap, since we were somehow better about carrying Dramamine around as a cup of water on a bonfire, rather than dispensing it preventatively. Our youngest, always ready to push boundaries and fight boredom with pugnacious mischief-making, was thrilled to have a newly conscious target, and, already feeling below par, her sister wasn’t about to turn the other cheek. This was the tightrope that we spent the last five road-winding hours walking. Children know that you have no true, immediate discipline options on a road trip, in a car. Our route included multiple stops to break up the day, which meant that a 9-hour drive stretched to 15. It’s a lot of together time and, my helpful comparisons to the size and time and distance of wagon trains aside, the car grew smaller as the hours grew longer. Come ON, kids! We’re making MEMORIES here! “Can I play on your phone?” “No. Well, yes. But at least LOOK outside while I get it out.”

A funny thing happened, though. After that 15 hour drive, our bar reset. How far is it? About 30 minutes. No comment. How far is it? Two hours. Shrug. We spent a lot of time in the car and for the majority of it, we were – I think – making memories. When we drove through Custer State Park and got caught in a traffic jam of buffalo, the girls were exhilarated, joyous in their wonder at these giants in our midst. “It was only 2 hours,” they pleaded, “Can we do it again?”

By the drive home, maybe we’d found our groove, or maybe we were all just tired and mellow. The 6-hour-drive took about 12, including an hour-and-a-half tour of the Wind Cave, a sizable stop at a wild mustang sanctuary, lunch and dinner. Our youngest created an entire world with the stuffed horse she’d gotten at the sanctuary and named Isabella; our oldest mostly napped, that enviable talent. As we pulled into our driveway, unbending our stiff legs and backs, thrilled to be home, but glad to have left, the youngest of us summed it up perfectly: “Good job, family!”