My dream of the open road

Last night, a perfect night weather-wise, I sat out on the porch late and talked to my old pal Margot by phone.   Don't remember how it came up but I wound up telling her about my dream of the open road.

It's a fairly ordinary and common dream.  Someday, I dream, I will just get in the car and drive.

I plan to drive in a large circle and wind up exactly back where I started from.  I'm going to drive around the country and see what I can see.

This is an old, old dream of mine.  I dreamed it before I'd ever heard of Charles Kuralt or read John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley.  I dreamed it before I had a driver's license.  I dreamed it sitting in the back seat of my parents' car enjoying long drives to Cape Cod and Lake George and Washington D.C.  I dreamed it whenever we arrived at our destinations when I was always disappointed, at least for the moment, that the drive was over.

Someday, I told Margot, I'm coming out to see you.  Margot lives somewhere in the Midwest, way out to hell and gone.  I'll arrive late at night after driving all day on the backest of back roads.  My dream, of course, is not of highways.  When I go, I'm taking the long way to everywhere.

Margot asked if I'd be traveling in an RV.

Margot likes to imagine me making myself look ridiculous.

No, I told her.  I'll probably just take the wagon.

If I get ambitious, though, I'll buy a pickup truck and put a camper cab on the back, which is what Steinbeck did.  Maybe I'll get a dog to take along for company.  I'll need company because I'll be traveling alone.  This trip won't work unless I can travel at my own pace and on my own schedule.  There can't be anybody in the passenger seat saying she's sick of the back roads, let's just find I-80 and do some flying.  There can't be anybody saying when we're looking for an inexpensive motel for the night, "If you say 'We'll leave the light on for you' one more time I will push you out of the car, take the wheel, and run you over, so help me God!"

My dog won't care if I do my impression of Tom Bodett a dozen times every night.

I promise not to name my dog Charley.

You'll notice, as Margot noticed, that in my dream I have enough money that I can stay at a Motel 6 any night I'm sick of sleeping in my camper.   That will be a lot of nights.  My dream isn't of roughing it.  My dream is of driving and seeing what's out there.  It's not of pretending I'm a pioneer.

When I get to Margot's I don't expect I will be spending that night in a Motel 6.  She and her husband are hospitable folks and they will insist on putting me up for a night or two.  Margot's a pal.  The fact that I have Margot for a pal has added a new angle to my dream.

Margot, you see, is a blogger.  I only know her because our paths crossed virtually in cyberspace.  It's about time we met face to face.  There are quite a number of you out there it's high time I met face to face. 

Since talking to Margot I've thought about all the bloggers I would like to meet and where they live and it turns out that I know enough of you and you are scattered widely enough that I could plot my drive across the country as a drive from one blogger's house to the next.  I don't expect all of you to put me up for the night.

That's why they have Motel 6's.

They'll leave the light on for me. 

I would leave my house and head South.  I would travel down as far as Georgia and then cross over, with several stops in Texas and New Mexico, and then head up the coast of California, where I'd stop half a dozen times, and on up to Oregon and Washington and up into Canada, if I'm invited.  I'd come back down along the Mississippi, crossing back and forth as I went, and after visiting Iowa City and St Louis, head back upwards and hit Chicago and then Detroit before coming back home through Ohio and Pennsylvania, with my last stops being Philadelphia and New York City.

All my blogger pals in New York City would throw me a welcome home party.

I'd have been gone close to two years.

I'd have been blogging the whole way, naturally, and I'd return home with the makings of a book.  I'm sure I'll come up with a better title, but right now its working title is Travels With Bloggers.  If there are any book editors or agents reading this post, I think I can manage this whole trip on a modest advance against royalties.

The blonde thinks this is a great idea.

She's not about to let me go through with it.

But she understands why I'd like to do it.

Maybe if the advance against royalties isn't all that modest...

But writing a book isn't the point.  Meeting you isn't the point, although I'd be looking forward to that.

The point, as I said, is driving and looking around.

Some days I'd do a lot more looking around than driving.  Some days I'd drive from from sun-up to well past sun-down and then, after a good night's rest at Motel 6, I'd get up and do it again.

Every now and then I'd drive all night.

I like to drive at night, so maybe that would happen more than just now and then.

My liking to drive at night is probably why I like this poem so much.  It's by Ted Kooser.  It's called Highway 30.  The real reason I wrote this post is so I could show you this poem.

At two in the morning, when the moon
has driven away,
leaving the faint taillight of one star
at the horizon, a light
like moonlight leaks
from broken crates that lie fallen
along the highway, becoming
motels, all-night cafes, and bus stations
with greenhouse windows,
where lone women sit like overturned flower pots,
crushing the soft, gray petals of old coats.

In my dream I stop at those all-night cafes at two in the morning for pie and coffee before getting on the road again so that I can arrive at your house by dawn.

Update thrown out the window from a passing car:  Jennifer of Saying yes...has her own dreams of the open road, except that she acts on them and she has a favorite traveling companion, her husband Griz, with whom she will soon be celebrating 15 years of connubial road trips.  What's more she and Griz have instilled a love of the open road in at least one of their daughters:

Someone once asked my oldest lamblet if she had a DVD player in her car for those long trips. She said no, she took books, but other than that, she preferred to look out the window at the view. "What's the point of going somewhere else if you're not going to look at the changing scenery?" she asked.

Something about that kid I like.

Comments

[captain Goto]

Hmmm.

Just now I happen to be reading Pete Jordan's "Dishwasher".

And, yes, as a guy who harbored a similar Dream, when I was finishing college, the nightly Motel 6 rates do assume a fairly hefty advance on the projected literary masterpiece that is expected to follow.

[JD]

In my version of the Dream, it was the sensation of being in motion that I craved, of being gone. My exemplar was "Blue Highways".

[SV]

Hey, if the missus can let you go for a week at a time, do it in short bits - highway it out to where you left off the last time, get off the interstate and loop around a smaller area, say no more than 500 miles wide. That's how I'm seeing the Great Lakes - the first year I circled Lake Michigan, then it was Erie and Ontario, a side trip through the Adirondaks, and this fall - Superior here I come!

Oh, and if you need a rest stop in the Chicago Loop, I've got a guest room. I'm a lurker, not a blogger, but dude, hotels are expensive downtown. :D

[Ken Muldrew]

"on up to Oregon and Washington and up into Canada, if I'm invited."

Of course you are! Just don't get too much of a tan while you're here or the Minutemen might give you a hard time when you're trying to get back into the States.

[Linkmeister]

No bridge or ferry from the West Coast to here yet, regrettably.

[Martina]

I've been quietly following (and enjoying) your blog for a while now. I've always thought that there are road people and non-road people; people who see the freeway as a way to get somewhere as quickly as possible and others who see it as a connector to a never ending series of possibilities in the form of intriguing exits leading to country roads. As a road person, I can definitely appreciate your dream. There is nothing like a summer day, windows rolled down (or better yet a convertible with the top down) and a little Chris Isaak singing "Gone Ridin'" as your car winds its way through the backroads filled with things you'd never get to see if you just stuck to the freeway.

[Linkmeister]

Martina, personally I'm rather fond of baseball on the car radio, but music is a close second.

[Sunny Jim]

Hey Lance, you better not wait too long to do that trip - if the price of gas keeps going up, you'll need one of J.K. Rowling's advances to keep filling up that truck. One good thing is that when you turn 50 you can join A.A.R.P. and get their 10% discount card for all Motel 6's. This will help offset the other costs.

[Jennifer]

Lance is a vampire. He turned 50 looooooong ago. Maybe vampires get a special discount as well.

[Exiled in New Jersey]

Seven years ago I had the same urge: Ketchikan was my destination.

http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/433531

[Rana]

Just be sure to choose the Motel 6s wisely - they range from wonderful to ones that, honestly, are much worse than sleeping in a camper!

[Claire]

Great post, Lance. Summer always has me itching for road trips, probably because we drove to all holidays as kids.

One summer, my brother and sister and I drove up to Wisconsin from Ohio for a family trip. We took my car at the time, whose a/c wasn't working, so it was a sticky trip, with the windows down and the music turned way up, but it was great.

[Jennifer]

Thanks for the nod, Lance... even if you are a vampire. That's why you like to travel at night, isn't it? :)

[grasshopperkm]

The poem is so much better the way you've couched it, Lance. Your two sentences after the poem itself send it to an even loftier realm. Thanks.

[Doug K]

my wife and I did this in 1991. We used a brown Ford Econoline cargo van (you can't see America from a Japanese car), drove N. Carolina to New Mexico, then up and around all the west coast and mountain states, through Canada to Alaska, up to the Arctic Circle, then pottered slowly back to Carolina. It cost about $10 000 for the seven months we were on the road, but we camped everywhere and gas was only $1.20 a gallon. Of the three nights we spent under a roof in that time, one was in a Motel 6 to recover from a week of wet muddy windy canoeing. The motel was truly ghastly, I felt like a suspect on the lam.

At Gila Forest in New Mexico, we met a hippie who was bicycling around and writing his journal using a solar-powered laptop. He looked at our old van and brand-new Coleman stove and said 'just starting out, eh ?', then shared his tips for life on the road. I still have the crystal he gave me for luck.

We kept a journal too, but the old-fashioned way, using pointy sticks to make marks on 'paper'. It was a very good year.

[KathyF]

You really really ought to read Travels With Macy, an update on Travels with Charley, only with a golden retriever and an RV. Bruce Fogle, a popular vet here, recreates, more or less, Steinbeck's journey, with a side trip to Canada, making astute political commentary all along the way. And feeding his dog doughnuts, which tells you why he's such a popular vet.

I just checked on Amazon, and no one had reviewed it, so I did.

[Rico]

Hey, yes, go. I had a sabbatical whilst working at Apple awhile back, and spent 63 days driving in a big circle around the country. Among other adventures, I met the woman with whom I'm now living in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. (And a far cry from San Jose, California, where I started out.) If you ever get going, do come by. We'll put you up.