Standard operating procedure for road trips: (1) get up at the crack of dawn; (2) pack
car; (3) hit the road by 7:30 (original intent: 7:00, but packing car took
longer than you thought); (4) make good time; (5) get to X (city, state) by Y
o’clock. But if getting there is some
meaningful percentage, up to and including half, the fun, then why begin with
an alarm clock and a mad rush?
I prefer analogizing the road trip to the age of sail. Ships would
set sail on the evening tide. The
day was spent loading provisions, cargo and passengers in daylight—bustling, to
be sure—and the evening tide would float the ship out of the harbor until it
could catch the wind on the open sea.
Since the ship was its own hotel, there was no need to get to the
Holiday Inn Express by nightfall.
Okay, so we will pull in to the West Des Moines
Hilton Garden in by around 9:30, when our eyelids and limbs get droopy. But before that, a day bustling, but not
crazy. Pick up car from body shop around 2:00 (having backed into a pole the
Friday before), put on the ski rack, packed six months worth of stuff into the
back, incredibly, without occluding the driver’s rear view, backing out of the
driveway (without mishap) at 4:00, then a couple of stops in town. Then picking our way through early rush hour
traffic under a bruise-colored sky, then the suburban highway, then breaking
out onto the open road at dusk. Crossing the city limits of Madison, whose
shore won’t see again for a long while, I think that trading six months of my
well-known life for whatever lies just beyond the horizon was a good trade. The
ribbon of road ahead curves and fades into darkness over a small rolling rise, the
dashed lane markers like whitecaps.
