I'm on vacation this week, but got a chance to check in today I've been writing journal entries every day while on vacation, so I thought I'd share my entries one by one as I have internet access.
Saturday, August 4
I love road trips. There's something about the open road that really appeals to me. Perhaps it's because I was raised on road trips -- Mom and Dad piling us three kids into the station wagon (lying on sleeping bags in the back end, mind you -- something impossible in this modern era of car seats), hitting the road to California, or Philadelphia, or Minnesota. We saw the Liberty Bell, Alcatraz, the Grand Canyon. The beaches of Florida, the prairie of the Dakotas, the Rocky Mountains -- we saw it all in trips in the trusty family station wagon.
So I hit the road today on my way to our annual family lake trip in Wisconsin. The rest of my family is in Chicago, so I will stop over at Dad's tonight and head up to Twin Lakes, Wisconsin tomorrow. I left late, as you always do on a road trip (I think it's a requirement that all your preparations always take longer than you think they will). Then, of course, the side trip to hated-but-on-the-way Walmart to pick up a car radio transmitter for my iPod; the old one suddenly ceased working, as if death was a preferable option to nine more hours of dealing with my eclectic taste in music and my increasing hoarse sing-along.
I love the open road, even I-80 through Ohio and Indiana -- an endless expanse of asphalt and relative sameness of countryside. In this case, you start to notice the subtle differences; the rivers and endless hills of Pennsylvania easing through Ohio into the flat farmland of Indiana. Even the driving differs as you move across the landscape. People are more polite in western PA and Ohio. Everyone slows down in Indiana despite the increase in the speed limit to 70 mph, or they drive in three- of four-car clumps, as the Indiana state troopers are notorious for targeting out-of-state speeders. Then ah -- Illinois! The speed limit becomes 55, but that stops noone -- traffic in the left lane moves along at speeds near 80, and those even more impatient regularly weave in and out of traffic with relative impunity. (As I've incurred two of my three traffic tickets in Illinois, I am not quite as brave as most, hanging mostly in one of the middle lanes at a relatively conservative 70.)
I am endlessly curious on the road. I wonder at the stories of the other drivers. Where is he going? A U-Haul truck -- someone going off to college, perhaps? Cars with no luggage befuddle me, as it occurs to me only later that gasp -- local drivers use I-80 too! I'm a constant sideways glancer as I pass other cars. I like to know who I'm smiling (or glaring) at as I drive. I occasionally pass a Hummer and have to quell that urge I always get to give Hummer drivers the finger. (I don't personally understand the need to drive to car so absolutely impractical.) And I develop a fondness for certain cars who become my companions on the trips, and feel sadness when their exit comes along, and I must bid them adieu.
I stopped for lunch somewhere in Ohio, and, deciding against fast food, pick up soup and fruit instead. Vegetable soup. Oh, bad ideas. Soup containers are the bane of my existence; I invariably send spurts of soup everywhere while trying to open them (I'm not even getting into my normal problems with dropping food on myself). When the automatic toilet flushes four times as I'm sitting on it (automatic toilets hate me), I decide this particular Ohio rest stop has a vendetta.
After a long drive, I do eventually make it into familiar territory. The exit names off 294 become familiar ones -- echoes of my childhood. At least - my exit! Slowing down (those Western Spring cops always have it in for speeders coming off the highway) I drive past the place where my sister was the victim of a hit and run car accident, the gas station where my mom's car is always in for repairs, and turn at my former junior high, which, despite small changes to landscaping, still looks the same.
As I drive down my childhood street, I marvel once again at the size of the trees. Dutch Elm disease killed off all of the elms in my youth, and the city went through a major replanting effort. So most of the time when I was growing up, the trees here were spindly little things. Now they've grown in height and stature, and the neighborhood is once again beautiful and shaded the way it was when my parents first bought their house.
I pull into the final block -- the familiar houses, the minor changes to landscaping and color. Dad isn't home, so the house is dark, and I must tiptoe my way up a porch that's well remembered but at this point a bit unfamiliar. The house smells the same, though, and I touch the piano on my way in -- an old familiar friend, a constant memory of the mother I miss all the more when I visit this, my childhood house.
I am home. It's familiar, and yet always a bit different than the way I remember it growing up. Perhaps it hasn't changed so much as I have. But it's always home in a way no other place will ever be.
