I'd lost the art of the roadtrip.
Maybe it was too many road trips with four children. Maybe it is their years later complaints about the bananas I packed that seemed to uber ripen while on the 1-15. Maybe it was the drive of tears leaving our home in Texas, or too many snowstorms and sliding off the road.
I came to be a frequent flyer over a frequent driver. I gave up driving to and fro. Too much work. Too much long sitting. Too many hours on the road.
And then came this weekend trip that was uncertain, and flights that didn't work with my schedule. I'll just drive. I worried, but on a Saturday afternoon, I just took off down the freeway and didn't look back.
I'd checked out two audio books. Both from my local library through Libby and Hoopla. I downloaded General Conference. I was armed. I packed two drinks, four oranges, three apples. I filled up with gas.
I hit one rainstorm. I seemed to reach the next mile markers after the storms. Part of the way, I was rained on by other cars just ahead of me who'd captured the rain in the wheels and truck beds of their cars.
The clouds. Some of my driving time was cloud-looking. They were dark, light, billowy, flat. From great distances, I saw rain fall. Clouds passed and opened into pure blue sunshine. Fields were green. Black cows grazed. And always, new growth in the desert since the last time I'd driven this way on a roadtrip.
Gas stations advertise their lowest price from signage hundreds of feet in the air, visible from a mile away. How fun to find a gas station with unleaded regular for $4.17 a gallon. And plenty of stations with $4.69, and $5.09 per gallon. I sweated paying the high price of $5.09. Even entertained thoughts of looking for less expensive gas, but I knew it couldn't be found. So I watched as the numbers flipped by and the total came to $85.00. I swallowed and felt grateful I could pay. I thought of friends and people who have been hit by this hardship. I passed a lady catching the bus and wondered if she'd started bus riding cause she couldn't afford to fill up her tank.
When I added up the gas receipts, it was still less than a round trip flight.
I had forgotten the beauty of cross state travel, of wilderness. After passing clouds, I looked in the rearview mirror and caught the clearest, brightest red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo, and violet of a rainbow. I wanted to stop and absorb the spectacularity! But this was a road trip with a time destination.
As I reached the part of my travel that opened up to the vista of Las Vegas, there was one massive cloud resting over the city. It was in the form of angel wings. Shafts of light from the setting sun broke through the wings in several places. It was a cloud formation I will never forget. My heart took a photo.
The trip was a fast turn around, and I wondered how would I make the same six hour trip a day later. I set my eyes on the Beaver cheese factory for some fresh cheese curds. The countdown began from the outskirts of Las Vegas.
It was satisfying, but somehow the curds weren't as good as I remembered. But it didn't matter, for the anticipation lessened the perceived time.
My cousins used to drive to Canada every summer to visit their mother's family. It was twenty hours of driving. On the way there, Uncle Ernie always stopped in Bear Lake to get raspberry milkshakes. When my cousin recalls this ritual, we are sure it was out of the way, but my uncle had mastered the art of the roadtrip.
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