Road Trip of a Different Stripe

Road trip!!!!

Remember the last time you said that with genuine enthusiasm? In college, maybe? Or was it more recently? Before or after gas hit $4 a gallon?

In spite of what "Repo Man" told us -- among that flick's many truisms, "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are," has really stuck with me all these years -- I love to get behind the wheel and just take off. The feel of the open road, the rush of forward momentum, the promise of new scenery -- it's an escape that a time-pressed control freak like me can understand. No seat on an Airbus has the same effect.

My friend, Mary (of this blog's title), has always had an affinity for the road, too, and a sense of adventure that's taken her across the country multiple times. She's even been smart enough to make pit stops in historically or geographically significant locations, while I whipped by all that so fast on my one Kentucky-to-Los-Angeles drive that I might've missed the Grand Canyon if it hadn't been so, well, grand.

Mary and I come from a car culture in the South, where you are what you drive, and motoring long distances was just part of the fabric of the place. It's no surprise that it's ingrained in both of us.

In my case, if my family wanted to see our cousins or grandparents, we had to pile into the station wagon -- the one with missing seat belts, mind you -- since we lived in the "big city" of Louisville, Ky., and our kin was out in the country.

Those daylong jaunts involved lots of two-lane roads and some "Dukes of Hazzard" driving by my dad, but we all survived. My mom's lecture about keeping our hands and feet in the car had been unusually effective. Never mind that any wreck would've sent us shooting around like missiles inside that wood-paneled Ford. Ah, the '70s.

We'd venture further away from home during spring break and sometimes summers, but those trips would involve only a subset of my large family. The travel party would consist of my mom, my aunt, a random sibling and me (the youngest). Usually that sibling hadn't been sly enough to talk his or her way out of the "vacation" that would include constant rest stops for the little sister with a pea-sized bladder and no roadside diner that didn't have an orange roof.

Since sitting still had never been my strong suit, I was always just thrilled to be going somewhere, anywhere. Gary, Ind., the home of a relative, was no garden spot, quite the opposite, but I didn't care. Give me a bag of sourballs to stave off the motion sickness, and I was ready to roll. (I had none of the responsibility or stress of driving, navigating, paying, so of course it was one long line of Howard Johnson's banana split for me).

Later, we made it all the way to Florida so I could see Disney World, palm trees, the ocean, copious amounts of road kill and scenic Interstate 95. It never occurred to us to fly, or at least I never heard any discussion of it, and I doubt we could've afforded it. And anyway, "Have car, will travel" could be part of the family crest.

Mary and I have made a number of road trips of varying distances together, the longest was a weekend in Dallas when we were in college in Louisville. Packed into the car with some friends, mix tapes, junk food and pillows, I slept the entire way there and back. And if I didn't appropriately apologize before, allow me to do so now. Sorry, Mare, that I was such a house afire. I think I violated any number of rules in the unofficial road trip handbook, like, "Thou shalt stay awake long enough to play a raunchy version of the license plate game." Glad there were conscious people there to keep you company.

It's been decades since then, and times certainly have changed. While I do still love to get up and go, I'm good these days for about two, three hours in the car, tops, before I'm bored and stiff, annoyed and road ragey. I don't need an antsy kid in the back seat, since I'm the one constantly chanting, "Are we there yet?"

I've done the cross-country drive from Kentucky to Los Angeles only once, as I mentioned before. It was not a leisure trip. I was traveling at breakneck speed, driving a U-Haul with all my belongings and my travel-ready gray tabby, Ellie, and towing a car crammed with more junk, to get to a new job.

I've sworn I'll never do that again, under any circumstances.

When Mary told me she intended to make the drive with Patricia, I'll admit to being completely stunned. It's a long, tedious, exhausting trip under the absolutely best conditions. With an aging parent on board, what would that even mean? An estimated week in the car, for starters, with backup plans for a slower journey if Pat has any health issues or Mary, the sole driver, needs extra breaks.

I've already joked about their "Thelma-and-Louise"-style trek, and I know there will be plenty of laughs as Mary and Pat bond across 3,000 miles. But it won't be easy for either of them: for Mary, the weight's all on her to safely make it across country with Pat, who, as you'll learn from earlier posts on this blog, hurt her knee just before the trip and needs help walking. And for Pat, it's exciting to come to a new life in L.A., where both her daughters live, but it's bittersweet to leave the home she's known for 40-plus years.

So it's a road trip of a different stripe, not the kind we took as kids or as students. From what I've already seen from Mary's photo posts, the food's definitely better this time around. But so much has changed about the logistics and the day to day.

The goal, of course, is the same. See the country, put one place behind and wrap your arms around another, feed the wind (maybe metaphorically) in your face. Sourballs optional.

Keep up with Mary as she and Pat inch across our fine country -- you'll find the Twitter feed to the right of this blog (up top). And say a little prayer for their journey.

-- T.L. Stanley