Take a road trip! Do you? How?

Last year a buddy and I drove from VA Beach to San Diego. I touched down at the Norfolk airport, picked up the SUV we rented, met him at the Naval base when his duty ended and he said "Dude, I think I forgot to tell you my license is suspended."
Of course this was after the hundreds of dollars spent in hotel costs and plane tickets. Of course, cause that made sense.

The plan was to drive from VA to San Diego with a mandatory stop in Roswell, NM. Then fly to Vegas for a few days. I was to meet the wife and my mother in Vegas. So we made the trip, with me doing all the driving. He complained most of the way about not getting to California quick enough. So I had to speed up the trip just to shut him up. I enjoyed it for the most part, but would have liked to stop more. So I decided to take the trip again, this time with my wife. We're gonna go next year. Spend about 7 days driving from VA Beach to San Diego. Spend about 3 days in San Diego on the beach. Then fly to Vegas. Spend a few days in Vegas, then fly home to Chicago (Back to reality). Definitely looking forward to all that alone time with my wife on the road driving and taking in the sights.

 

Family trips when I was a kid usually involved trips by car to traditional destinations year after year: Cape Cod in the summers, Guilford, CT on Black Friday to pick out a tree at the same tree farm every season and browse the local shops for new Christmas decorations. My parents had little tolerance for long stretches of driving and usually topped out at 5hrs.

More substantive trips, like the string of family summer vacations we took “out West” between 3rd grade and high school, involved longer stretches by car from destination to destination—as @snowy pointed out, everything there is farther apart—but stopping for attractions was never spontaneous. My father insisted on planning everything ahead of time, whether things to do, places to see, or where to find a meal.

In college I was the lucky recipient of a scholarship that funded a self-planned project. Mine happened to involve traveling across the country and back, interviewing web designers over a month the summer between my junior and senior year. I was a novice driver at best then, having grown up in a walkable community, barely driven as a high school student, and attended college in New York City where owning a car was unnecessary at best. I wasn’t interested in stitching together a bunch of boring plane trips, so my girlfriend at the time and I did the entire trip by train.

Since that time, I’ve finally gotten the knack of driving, but my road trips as an adult are still largely destination-based and lacking in spontaneity. During my marriage, my exwife had a lot of disparaging feelings about the quality of my driving skills, so she spent most of the time behind the wheel. Two stints at a long distance relationship in the last decade saw me cover the stretch between here and the Detroit metro area dozens of times, but I was always so consumed with getting to my destination as quickly as possible that waypoint attractions never interested me.

A cross country road trip has been on my bucket list for a while, but it won’t be worth it to me if I don’t give it the time and openness to spontaneous detours, longer stretches of backroads, and opportunities for random photography that it would deserve. With COVID and relentless obligations to my job, it likely won’t happen anytime in the near future.

But this makes me think that any shorter trip that might materialize before then—to visit my parents in Delaware or possibly a trip out to Chicago, which I’ve been contemplating for a while—might benefit from some non-Interstate driving time wherever possible.