There are good travelers and bad travelers, road warriors and road wimps, those who think the highway is a paved adventure and those who know that Adolf Hitler is spending eternity stuck on the Pennsylvania turnpike.
Ours is a mixed marriage. My husband’s idea of a vacation is driving 2,800 miles, whereas I can’t relax in a bucket seat unless it’s ejected from the vehicle and sitting on a beach. But marriage is about compromise, so I agreed to drive to the East Coast and he agreed to do everything my way for the next 50 years.
Road warriors are easily entertained. They get excited over things like crossing a state line or seeing an Oklahoma license plate. Road wimps sit quietly in a stupor, watching the white lines and wondering if life would be better if they opened the car door and jumped out.
The Midwest is a bad place to start a road trip because you’re trapped in the grain belt. There’s Iowa. Nebraska. Kansas. Illinois. States only a corn borer could love.
As we crossed the Illinois border, my husband explained to the children that Lincoln was buried there. I tried. I really tried. I visualized and strained, but I just couldn’t stir up enthusiasm about Lincoln’s corpse rotting away inside state boundaries.
As we escaped Illinois, a sign said ‘Thank you for using the Illinois Tollway.’ Like it was a favor or something. If you’re in Minnesota and want to reach Kentucky, you’re stuck with Illinois. The best thing you can say about Illinois is that it isn’t Arkansas.
It’s a myth that children keep asking ‘Are we there, yet?’ That’s only on trips of short duration. After about 200 miles or so, the kids stop asking and attack each other instead, fighting over the purple jellybean under the driver’s seat. Meanwhile, their excess energy builds up like static electricity until the energy time bomb explodes at 11:54 p.m. in the hotel room.
I eat a lot on the road. I’m not sure why. Boredom. Anxiety, maybe. Food helps to measure distance. Ohio is a great big pot belly of a state – it’s approximately 3,243 Tic Tacs wide.
You burn no calories, sitting for hours moving nothing but your eyelids, yet somehow life seems more worthwhile if you buy a bag of stale candy at a rest stop. I accidentally swallowed a peanut M&M whole, and agonized for miles while the peanut gallstone worked its way down my pipes. Then I missed the diversion.
People are friendlier in Southern states. They hand you your McDonald’s coffee sweetened with ‘Here ya go, darlin’.’ Except Virginia is fairly hostile to drivers – they’ve got signs that say ‘Speed limit enforced by aircraft.’ We got lucky. We weren’t attacked by fighter jets – not even once.
Tolls are a nuisance. In Illinois, you pay a 15-cent toll, drive 10 miles, then get hit with a 40-cent toll. Why don’t they just collect 55 cents and be done with it?
Then there’s West Virginia, which extorts heavy tolls from anybody passing through its borders, especially drivers lucky enough to come from states that have actual economies.
At least West Virginia is nice to look at, although it’s too hilly. A perfect driving state has no tolls, no road construction, plenty of rest stops, great scenery and a narrow girth. I imagine that, if not for the ocean thing, Hawaii would be the perfect state to drive through. It would be a really fine idea for Congress to develop a bipartisan initiative to replace Ohio with Hawaii.
By the end of the trip, our vehicle gasping for its second oil change in a month, we’re much more appreciative of the simpler things in life. Rest stops with toilet paper. Idiotic word searches that kill 13 minutes before nausea kicks in. Tailwinds that scrape bug splat off the windshield.
We’re also poorer. Fatter. Wiser. Stupider. And much closer as a family, having survived two weeks together in the asphalt trenches.