I'm dragging out a pop song from the 80s (oh, those college years) because travel is on my mind. Especially so since tomorrow morning I'll be off on a 1000-mile one-way road trip. Well, one-way road trip ... I am going to come back home, it'll just be via air.
I recently heard a saying to the effect that, while Americans have little sense of history, Europeans have little sense of distance. And that's true, in a way. America is a go-go, new is better, get rid of that old stuff and build something shiny type of place. Heck, hardly anything west of the Appalachians is more than 150 years old at the most anyway. By contrast, a century-old building in Europe can be considered a crass newcomer, when they have structures and monuments and things right in the middle of their day-to-day lives that are over a thousand years old.
But Americans know their road trips. They know what it means to cross vast distances, stopping only for gas and physiological needs, vaulting across deserts, mountains, prairies, hills, cities and empty spaces ... and still being in the same country they started in. Cross-country from New York to San Francisco (the old Lincoln Highway route, by the way, which I think is totally awesome) is about 3000 miles. You know where you'd end up if you traveled 3000 miles from London? Baghdad, that's where. You'd pass through maybe a dozen different countries, with their own cultures and histories and ethnic memories and all that ... in the same distance an American can pass through, well ... America.
So yes, around here we appreciate distances, and the relative ease with which we can travel them. Bringing me to my point: a thousand-mile trip in a car is a pretty long way, particularly when you're trying to do it fast.
A couple of months ago my wife and I accompanied my son on a pretty quick road trip from our home in Iowa to North Carolina. It was an apartment-hunting trip for my son, who is starting graduate school in NC in just a couple of weeks, now. We left on a Thursday when I got off work; stayed overnight in Indianapolis; covered the rest of the way on Friday; saw about four or five apartments on Saturday and happily put down a deposit on one, since they were going like hotcakes, then started partway back on Saturday afternoon (having spent about 20 hours total at our destination); then made the last, long, drive from West Virginia to Iowa on Sunday. Let me tell you, that's a lot of driving in essentially four days.
Now, there was lots to like on that trip. The mountains and forests of West Virginia and Virginia were immensely cool, as were all the trees throughout North Carolina. I mean, we have trees in Iowa, but you can still see through and around them most of the time. In North Carolina, the trees (and kudzu) are everywhere, and you don't get much of a distant view, at least not at ground level. When anticipating this trip, I recalled earlier drives I had made from Iowa to Florida. From southern Illinois all the way to Georgia, the view is very scenic, with various types of forests, plus the Smokey Mountains in southeastern Tennessee. Now, from Atlanta to Florida there just ain't much there, but I still was anticipating a pleasant, scenic drive through a good portion of our trip to North Carolina.
Nope. As I said, from West Virginia on, it's beautiful and there's plenty to look at. Unfortunately, that's only about a third of the trip. From Iowa to southeastern Ohio, it all literally looks the same. Exactly the same. You really wouldn't know you had traveled very far at all unless you looked at your odometer ... or felt the ache of your muscles being strapped into that seat for some 10-plus hours. Gaaah.
Why is this coming up now? Well, starting tomorrow, I am making the trip again. Only this time, in a 16-foot Budget truck with the various accouterments of a young adult male staking his claim on a one-bedroom apartment in North Carolina. My son will be coming along in his own car, stuffed to the gills with clothes and golf clubs and whatnot, so we can't even share the thoughts and emotions of the drive. Thanks to my daughter, though, I do have a way to play my iPad music in the truck. I've got my GPS to help if there's trouble on the route. Saturday and Sunday hotels are already reserved. I've made a plan to go longer on Saturday, so Sunday shouldn't seem quite so long. Plus ... we've driven it already. AND, I don't have to drive it back. That was a really, really long trip back from NC the last time.
So, once again, I'm doing the American thing. Road tripping, with a real purpose, though, of getting my son delivered to his next stage of life. Just think, if I drove this far from London, I'd be in Warsaw or somewhere in that vicinity. That sure seems like it should be longer than Iowa to North Carolina...
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