My Wonderful, Traumatic First Road Trip

I have always loved road trips. Just get in the car and go. Of course, I also used to sleep on road trips—hooray for naps!—and for a long time I was too young to drive, but I loved them despite my likely whines to the contrary.

While Earl has taken a few smaller road trips up to Newport, RI, for the Newport Folk Festival, I’m hoping with this trip to instill that same love in her—to give her the same kinds of memories that I have.

I took my first road trip when I was 5. My parents, both grandmothers, my big brother, and I piled into a van to trek westward. I was enamored by the van. It was a beauty of a conversion van borrowed from one of my father’s friends, huge and plush and the back bench folded down into a bed and there was a table for playing cards. I remember peering over the back seat and wondering how on earth my father was going to pack all of the stuff six people needed for two weeks on the road, plus the requisite two sets of golf clubs, into that tiny little space.

Needless to say, my father is a car packing fiend. I have blossomed into one as well. Back away from my back end, bellboys—only I, the Prodigal Packer, can get all of that stuff back in the way it came out!

We took a video camera on the trip, and somewhere there are VHS-C tapes of my blonde hair blowing every which way in Dodge City. Dust was everywhere, and that was the first time my mom allowed me to scale the ladder on the back of the van to see how high I could go.

There was an ski excursion in Colorado where I got so angry with the ski people because they would not give me poles. You had to be six to get poles, but I was less than a week away and they would not give me poles. Righteous indignation doesn’t begin to describe the feeling, especially when you consider that I, a mere 5 year old without poles, aced the bunny slope on the first try. My brother, 21 and therefore trusted with the sacred poles, couldn’t even navigate the slight bump in the snow he encountered on the way to his ski lesson.

The anger was quickly assuaged by the doorman at our hotel in Colorado Springs with whom I had a brief but intense love affair. He did magic, pulling coins from behind my ears, and treating me like the queen as he gallantly gestured me through the doors into the lobby. For dinner, he recommended the corner chowder, and I made myself sick in the hotel bar eating corn chowder with my Nana, but I would not stop eating it because it was just so good.

We ventured up to Pikes Peak, befriending a fellow traveler along the way and giving her a ride to somewhere, back when it was safe to befriend fellow travelers and offer them a lift. The snow on the mountain was almost up to my father’s shoulders, even in May, and I wanted to dig tunnels and never come out.

Somewhere there’s a picture of me and Granny, Dad’s mom, standing on the Four Corners of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. She was tickled by that. But when it came to the Grand Canyon, Dad dropped us all off at the rim and went to park. Granny met him halfway back to the van, ready to go. “Mama, it’s the Grand Canyon!” “It’s a hole in the ground. I’ve seen it.” She was equally impressed a few days later with South Fork.

Life changed in San Antonio. In a motel, Granny fussed that she didn’t like chocolate while eating just as much of my chocolate ballerina birthday cake as any of the rest of us. I got a baby doll who sucked her paci, my first camera (a Kodak disk camera that I loved for years and years), and the true surprise of the day, the pronouncement that the family was growing. My sister had gotten married the year before and was expecting her first child. I was going to be an AUNT! Wasn’t I excited??

No! I come from an old family; my dad was 40 when I was born, practically dead with old age, and he was the second youngest. All my aunt and uncles were ancient. In an instant, I saw my freshly six-year-old self morph into my Aunt G. I flung myself on the bed and kicked and screamed, “I’m too young to be a dumb old aunt!”

It’s worth noting, at the time, Aunt G would have been right around 40. In other words, my age now. Aunt G, I apologize for ever thinking you were ancient. For what it’s worth, I no longer do. Age brings perspective and the older I get, the younger you are.

Decades have passed since that first road trip, but the memories are still just as vivid as ever. I remember feeling so loved on that trip, riding in the van, listening to stories, hearing my grandmas quibble and conspire, my parents navigate, and my brother practice his life-long patient tolerance for his baby sister.

Like me on that trip, Earl will come home a year older and broken in to adventure. Our car won’t be nearly so full of folks, but I hope it’s just as full of love and tolerance.