Topic: Travel

Author: Chris Dunn

I recently got back from a road trip, and already I want to go again. There’s just something about a road trip that calls to me. I think it’s that free untethered feeling, or maybe it’s a lost nostalgia of my youth, or some primal, innate calling to explore the unknown, but whatever it is it pulls me.

This most recent road trip was in answer to a nearly thirty year old seed which was planted in my brain my freshman year of college. I took my degree from Miami University where my father taught. Only a forty minute or so drive up US 27, sat a pile of red bricks which they called a “Public Ivy”. Nothing there ever really interested me, so I spent as many nights as possible back home running my games for the most dedicated group of gamers you’d ever find - ever free with a ride to and fro. We must have tread that trail a thousand times, and somewhere early on, I became aware that this highway - the same highway that had always led to the local mall – continued all the way to Florida. After that realization, I couldn’t help but stare down it and wonder what might happen if I just didn’t turn off. How hard would it be to follow all the way to the ocean? How fun? Thirty years later, I would find out.

My companion on this excursion was my oldest and dearest, Drew. He made the mistake of mentioning a similar bug once when we were eating at a local Skyline along this root, so when time and money came my way, he was roped in to ride shotgun. GPS made short work of my wonder, and the ocean came sooner than expected, still it was a blast just eating up the miles, stopping in at all the greasy spoons and marveling at the amazing lack of traffic you can find on state routes as opposed to interstates.

You’re more alive when you travel. That’s a major element to be sure. I say this because, it’s true. Think about it. Most of us rise in the morning at a set time, prep ourselves to the greet the day, the coffee drops on schedule to fuel our battle and then it’s off to the grind until we come safe home for dinner and our evenings. Weekends provide a brief respite, but most of us simply fall into a slightly different routine – one with the ratio of pleasure to work inverted. But when you travel, when you step off your beaten path, you have to open your eyes. You don’t know what over the next hill. “When’s the turn off?” “What did that sign say?” “Did you see the size of that- Oh, look! Is that a bear?” Our eyes are wide open, sucking in information, categorizing and interpreting for our education and our safety. We’re growing!

Plane travel is like a bus. Granted it gets you there so much faster, but after a few cramped coach flights, the shine is off the apple. Often on planes, I wish that they could just knock me out. A brief drop into pitch black, hyper sleep and the awake in the new land, because there’s so little in between. We read. We watch movies. Play games. Anything to pass the time. But a road trip, even one down a never ending redux of Colerain Avenue, is filled with wonders and oddities. I wound up calling it the Highway of Broken Dreams because every fifty miles or so, we came upon the shattered remains of someone’s great idea to sell fruit, curios, miniature golf, snow cones or the like, all boarded up with a faded sign hanging loose by a single chain. No other stands or attractions for miles, but these people all thought they could hunker down and feed off the life zipping by them on its way to anywhere but there.

Now I find myself drifting back to the family road trips to places like South Carolina and Michigan. We’d rent a cottage by some water – ocean, lake or river, it didn’t matter – and pile everyone in the car along with triptiks (that’s an 80s-era, analog version of GPS), bags full of snacks and a cooler full of sodas. The convenience of 24-hour roadside snack vendors had yet to be imagined. I was but a young fool then, and would spend my hours hunkered down behind my mother’s seat reading trashy novels about giant robots (which would later become fodder for those college day campaigns), never taking the time to enjoy the miles that blurred by outside my window. Later on friends would replace family, and a few turns at the wheel were required, but the miles came alive. Even a seemingly endless corn corridor through the whole of Kansas could be broken up searching for billboards declaring the largest ball of twine lay just over the bluff.

Recently, I went on my first cruise from San Francisco to Hawaii. The cruise director and crew worked tirelessly trying to entertain us, but I could’ve told them not to bother. Your dance nights and trivia quizzes hold no candle to the vastness passing by for hours on end outside our balcony. I would spend those hours just sitting marveling at how immense and serene the ocean was, reading a book in the shade with a rum cocktail while the miles rolled by beneath me. Sure we could’ve taken a plane and had more time to spend hopping islands on a tight schedule, but would that have been better, than being teleported to a theme park? I have an appreciation for just how far away our 50^th state truly is, and a respect for how huge the Pacific is, and a wonder for the technology that can carry us safely across it all with our helm tied to a star.

That’s it really. The journey. The journey’s the thing.