Soon, we’ll be taking a road trip to the Northeast with the kids to visit friends and family. This seemed a good time to reprise these two blog posts about road trips from July 2006, one from me and one from my spouse. Although we wrote these a couple years before we started our family and road tripping with kids presents its own challenges, I think the basic tenets still hold, both pro and con. With yummy snacks, four brand new tires for the Honda, a playlist compiled by the teen, and a couple of fun stops planned along the way, I am looking forward to this trip.
The case for road trips (originally posted July 27, 2006):
Although I like the excitement of foreign travel and am happy once I get to my destination, much of the planning and logistics beforehand make me incredibly anxious. And the waiting and potential delays and more waiting involved in air or train travel only add to the discouraging sense that there are endless hurdles standing between me and exotic locales around the world. Admittedly more mundane, local trips by car, however, are much more manageable, offering a measure of control and autonomy that the control freak in me appreciates. So, my travel ideal would be driving for 5 or 6 hours and ending up in Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin, Florence, and so on . . . *Sigh*
Here, then, are my top ten reasons why road trips are the way to go, even if where you’re going is nothing to write home about:
1) Departure and arrival times at one’s own discretion—some people make it a habit, a point of pride even, of arriving at the airport or station with only minutes to spare before boarding. I am not one of these people. The need to get to the terminal with plenty of time for checking bags, getting boarding passes, plus a time cushion for possible delays means added pressure on top of not forgetting essentials and packing the right reading material. Car travel, on the other hand, means being able to hit the snooze button at least once.
2) No waiting around in order to wait some more (increased security checks at airports adding to the wait)—air travel especially is basically one long wait broken up into stages.
3) No transfers—even when you get a direct flight or train, you need to get to the terminal and then take a cab or train or rented car to your final destination. There’s no way around the multiple modes of transportation. This usually requires more waiting.
4) No danger of forgetting tickets, passports, 2 forms of ID—I’m always paranoid about forgetting or losing some important document that will leave me stranded at some border or other.
5) Packing flexibility—wondering whether to pack an extra pair of shoes or another change of clothes? Extra books or a pillow? Throw ’em in the trunk!
6) Control of one’s immediate environment—all the portable electronic devices that now saturate our lives make it much easier to control our media input while traveling, and to create a kind of audio-visual barrier between us and fellow travelers. But there’s nothing quite like the semi-private space of the automobile where you can crank up your favorite tunes or travel in a cocoon of silence. Sometimes it’s fun to see what kinds of music turn up on the radio dial in a particular region. If you’ve got a fully functional car, it’s never too hot or too cold in there. And there aren’t people yakking on their cell phones or crying babies being carried up and down the aisles. The brief interludes at highway rest stops make the return to the car that much sweeter. For this trip, my husband and I rented audio books for the first time from the public library. We’ll see if they hold our attention.
7) Suspended animation—when I’m traveling by car, the time between point A and point B feels removed from everyday temporal reality. Getting into the car and leaving home, we’re stepping out of the scheduled procession of hours marked by daily rituals. Maybe it’s the sensation of moving while sitting still that adds to the feeling of being suspended in a medium heavier than the air we usually breathe. When we drove cross country six years ago, the six days it took us from L.A. to upstate New York felt like being underwater, the senses simultaneously dulled and heightened: the miles of road and hours of driving obliterated the details of the life we’d left behind and the new life to which we were headed. Being cut off from our usual social contacts and the usual entertainments, where no mail could reach us and cell phone reception was spotty at best—it was liberating in the way diving into a body of water can be, and it made me understand in a visceral way the romance of the open road that seems so deeply engrained in American mythology.
8) Time to talk—in that suspended space of the car, where time is undammed, conversation can flow more freely too. My husband and I talk all the time, but the demands of work, chores, and sleep means leisurely conversations are rare or curtailed. The enforced sitting for hours with not much to do but look out at the road unfurling before us allows for longer, more meandering conversations, gives us time to discuss things in depth, whether trivial or profound.
9) Time to veg—and when we’ve talked for hours, we sometimes drift into silence and let our minds wander. That, too, is a good thing.
10) Driving—Of course you have to like the activity of driving for road trips to be any fun. And if you do, the smooth uninterrupted interstate at 80 mph can seem an apt metaphor for optimistic possibilities: you can get off anytime you want or you can just keep driving toward the next horizon.
The case against (originally posted July 28, 2006 by contrary frog’s contrary spouse):
On the whole I like road trips. Well, with the wrong company they are about the worst thing in the world, but with the right company I really like them. So, more out a spirit of contrariness than any devotion to accuracy, the persona of my inner crank offers, in retort to [contrary frog] ten things to hate about road trips.
1) The food. Sure, it’s possible to pack healthy, nutritious food and keep it well enough preserved for it still to be good as you eat in the car five hours later, but how often does that really happen? Many muster a bottle of water and a box of crackers, but few are those who make a trip of any duration without eating something they would never eat in their everyday lives. Since crappy fast food is the food of my people, I sort-of enjoy being forced to eat it, but that lasts no more than a few hours, maybe a few bites.
2) The thing I forgot. I don’t know what it is or I wouldn’t have forgotten it, but I will remember it when I need it and it isn’t there. This isn’t unique to road trips, but the expectations are different since, after all, you can just throw things in the car: the sweater, the extra batteries, the late birthday present, the myrrh . . . when I travel by air I feel entitled to leave those things behind because I just couldn’t get them in my bag (singular).
3) Interstate restrooms. Need I say more? I imagine that the women’s rooms aren’t a treat either, but there are few things like a highway men’s room on a hot summer day to make one wonder about the basic life skills of the people who are driving all those . . .
4) Minivans. In cities SUVS are the main menace 2 society, but on the open road beware the minivan. They drift. They wobble. They drive too slowly, unless you pass them, in which case you trigger a testosterone high that drives them into a furious wobbling charge.
5) Fast and slow. Back when he was funny George Carlin observed –he was an observational comic—that when you are driving, everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, everyone driving faster is an asshole. Amen. I didn’t say “ten things I reasonably hate about road trips.”
6) Everything on the radio starting five minutes into the second hour of listening. As with the food, I approach this with good humor at the start. Hey, Johnny Paycheck. Oh my god, the Scorpions! So, that’s what Jessica Simpson sounds like. Now I know. Hey, mariachi music . . .
Two corollaries: a) the 15 minutes of denial I spend listening to NPR as it fades into white noise & b) every advertisement in the history of radio.
7) Bad signage. This doesn’t really affect me that often since I’m pretty good about planning ahead and bringing a map, but since I figure that by the time a sign goes up on the side of an interstate road it has had to pass certain engineering requirements for materials, been tested for legibility, its placement debated, etc. Or not, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t the product of guys with giant sketch pads and croquet wickets on the back of a pick-up truck writing as quickly as they can, tossing the things overboard, and hoping for the best. So, when a crucial sign is half-concealed by the only tree within miles, or says that something is at the “next right” when in fact it is the third right, or when the off-ramp for an east-west road gives me a choice between heading “north” or “south,” it offends my inner fascist.
8) Car accidents. Obviously being in one is terrible, but this doesn’t happen to most people with any regularity. What I mean is seeing the aftermath of car accidents, which you really can’t avoid seeing if you travel much more than, say, four hours. Other forms of travel can induce anxiety or a sudden awareness of what delicate little meat puppets we are when high speeds and steel are involved, but I’ve never been in plane that has flown by a plane wreck. Car travel is the only form of transportation in which you routinely witness some version of the worst-case-scenario fate for the vehicle type in question (except for walking).
9) Driving in my sleep. Like video game-playing, house-painting, or running through conjugations, driving is something that, if I do it all day, my mind can’t stop doing as I try to go to sleep. The difference is that I’m seldom risking my life if I fall asleep while conjugating verbs, but if I fall asleep when I (think I) should be driving, I jolt awake as if I were about to fall out of the tree.
10) The wastelands. On a trip of any duration you get to see a lot of interesting things, great architecture, natural beauty, an accidental monument, but you also get to see the wake and scars of America’s all-but unbridled capitalism: ghettoes, ghost towns, and butt-ugly office parks where farmland was a year ago. One can see any or all of these things on a daily basis, of course, but the movement of the road trip puts them into a different context, juxtaposing the socio-economically quick and dead in a montage cut to the soundtrack of Johnny Paycheck, the Scorpions, Jessica Simpson, mariachi music, and the fading crackle of Marketplace report that passeth understanding . . .
Contrary Frog 