For the past few days I’ve been helping my daughter plan a cross-country family trip.
Now she’s got me wanting to go.
She wants to take her kids on the same kind of trips that our family took when she was a child. Her oldest is 14, her middle child is 12 and the youngest is 7. All are now old enough to remember the things they will see. She and her husband have three weeks’ vacation and they’re ready to hit the road.
We took three such trips when my children were growing up, one all the way to California, one to the Yellowstone country and a third through St. Louis to Colorado. They were great experiences, and my three children remember the trips fondly — even if they did fight in the back seat halfway across the country.
My daughter is trying to plan everything down to a T. We just hopped in the car with a general idea of our destination and took off. Mostly we wound up at our destination. Sometimes, however, our adventuresome spirit took us elsewhere. No matter, we had fun.
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That’s what our trips were — adventures. We didn’t plan every day’s activities. We let the trip come to us, stopping at places that we found interesting, discovering tourist traps that were not listed on the maps.
We seldom stayed in any one town more than a single night. We took in the major sights and hit the road again, always looking for the next bit of excitement.
We had a good breakfast before we left the hotel, often ate bologna sandwiches at a rest stop for lunch and had a good meal at the end of the day. We traveled cheaply.
As I offered travel suggestions to my daughter, memories of those old trips came to mind. I remember my oldest daughter having the courage to try a buffalo burger at Wall Drug in South Dakota, my son finally learning to swim at a motel pool in Albuquerque and my middle daughter, who is planning this trip, being scared to death at the top of a dormant volcano in Arizona.
I remember the engine of my in-laws’ car, which we had borrowed because it was bigger, overheating as we crossed the Mojave Desert (we drove through 110-degree heat with the heater on to displace engine heat) and the brakes overheating as we came down the mountain from the redwood forest. There was always some type of excitement.
Some days we would cover 500 miles. There were few days when we drove less than 200 miles. We were always looking for the next big adventure.
We always went to the library before our trips to take out books for the kids on the various states we would pass through (there were no cell phones or tablets in those days). The trips were entertaining, but they were also educational.
In fact, three trips were primarily educational. In the third or fourth grade the kids were required to pick a state and report on it. We decided to take each child to his state the following summer.
My oldest daughter picked Tennessee (where she would eventually go to college), so we went to Nashville and Knoxville, with a side trip to the Great Smoky Mountains.
Our youngest picked Maine, which took us to L.L. Bean and Acadia National Park.
The middle child, being a typical middle child, picked Arizona, which was a long haul. Still, she got to her state and learned about it.
By making these trips, my children were able to visit more than 40 continental states before they graduated from high school. They saw the United States up close and personal, from the cornfields and hog lots of Iowa to cliff dwellings in Colorado.
Our trips were ones of exploration, nothing closely planned, but adventures to see what we could find next. And we found plenty. I wouldn’t trade the memories of those trips for anything, and neither would my kids.
Some families like to go sit on the same beach for a week every summer. That was never for me. I always wanted to see new places, to learn what this great country was all about.
I instilled that yearning for education and adventure in my children and thankfully they want their kids to see America, too. And a Griswold family cross-country trip is the way to do it.
It takes courage to travel 2,500 miles with three kids cooped up in the back seat, but, believe me, it is worth the effort.
Donnie Johnston’s columns appear twice per week on the Opinion page. Reach him at djohn40330@aol.com.