RoadTrip#1 On the Road Again

[Yellowstone Falls, Wyoming]

I was a student in the 60s and did many of the things that students did back then. Among my favorite diversions was the road trip. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, I had a love for jumping into a car with a few close friends, remarkably little money, and a three-buck road map to guide us along thousands of miles. Our objective was nothing more than to look out the car window and see the many looks of the US as you passed from urban to rural to mountains and to an ocean where strangely,  the sun set, rather than rose.

The road trips started small, then grew. After finals at Northeastern University, in Boston, Mass., my first road trip took me to Washington, DC.  Next came Montreal,  then the old Route One local road to Florida and Miami Beach.

But the vertical road trips were relatively small compared with the horizontals that would follow.

From 1967 and 1975, I crossed the continent three times in each direction. First was five guys in a 1961 Ford Galaxy with four classmates, and three fenders. Then with two political lefties in a beat up International Harvester. Finally I went off solo in an old Ford that broke down in Tennessee. I continued on  by thumb.

On these trips, I visited every state in the Union except Alaska and South Dakota. I meandered into Canada and Mexico. I had many adventures and encounters. They shaped who I would become as did Kerouac's spontaneous writing style.

But what stayed with me for so many years, was the land I got to see and sometimes touch. North America is a diverse, wondrous and mostly beautiful place. For me, it has inspired poetry and sometimes patriotism.

Patriotism was not a popular word among my friends in the  60s. We were angry about many government's policies. I had an earring, wore bell and hair that hid my shirt collar.  We were angry about a war and a draft that forced us into it personally. We were astonished to discover racism was an institution and indignant, that while we studied so many other people suffered.

Many of my friends, for a lengthy stint, started to hate the government and in so doing the country itself. What stopped me from becoming one of them, I am convinced, were these road trips.

I went out and actually saw the country. I met people  in parts of the country that looked and felt so very different from folks in my New England.  In our conversations with each other, we almost always found we had more commonalities than differences.

These conversations changed my perceptions of so many things. They still do now that I spend so much time online having conversations all over the world and discovering how very similar we are too each other.

I've been think a lot about this ever since last fall while watching Ken Burns National Parks series on NPR. More than anything I saw, traversing the United States, the National Parks were etched the most clearly in my mind. National Parks made me appreciate my land and respect a government that sets such places aside for people to see and appreciate rather than exploit and develop.

It is now 43 years since I first went cross country in the United States. So much has changed. I have live a life. I have grandchildren sleeping down the hall as I write this.

My wife Paula was not a college kid in the 60s. She was in her first marriage and raising two daughters and she had no time to protest and experiment as I did. She has only been to one national park.

While watching the Ken Burns series, I remembered one trip, when I and my traveling companions got stuck behind an over-sized camper that was moving a lot slower than we wished to go. We wanted a clear view of the beauty around us, but instead we were staring at this camper's back bumper. On that bumper there was a sticker.

"Too old to work. Too young to die. Just traveling" it said.

I'm now, I would guess, about the same age as the folks who were in that camper back then.

Paula and I decided last fall that we would take a road trip this summer, she for the first time and me to revisit roads previously travelled with a different set of eyes.

Originally it was going to be at least a month on the road, but I've had an odd year. There have been health and business issues. We shaved it down to just 10 days, but we are cramming much into our journey.

We leave Wednesday for Sunriver, Ore., to see more grandchildren and family. On the way up, we'll circle Shasta and Crater Lakes. Then we cross southern Idaho, stopping at the Craters of the Moon National Monument, then on to Jackson, Wyoming and Grand Teton National Park.

Yellowstone National Park will be next. We expect it  to be the highlight and I'll be there for two nights and 3 days. Then,into southwest South Dakota to see Mt. Rushmore, the Black Hills and Badlands, before turning back toward home in a route that takes us through Park City Utah, and our favorite week end destination of North Lake Tahoe.

And this time. there will be no hitchhiking. Ford Motors has agreed to loan me a Ford Escape Hybrid for evaluation on the road trip. I'm sure it is in far better shape than that old International Harvester. I'll tell you how it performs along the way.

For the next couple of weeks, this blog will be mostly about this road trip. It will serve as an online diary, which is what blogs were originally about. I will share with you some of what we see and experience.

I hope you enjoy vicarious travel