Road Trip

The America family road trip — immortalized so well by Chevy Chase and company — is a pretty miserable experience in my view. Pack the kids in the car to drive all day and half the night to Disney World? No thanks.

Driving long distances is pretty awful. Our rule in the bus has always been no more than 200 miles a day. There are plenty of days when we don’t even hit triple digit mileage. When you do this full time there’s no reason to hurry anywhere. The only time we’ve ever hurried anywhere was because we were meeting someone.

One reason we didn’t immediately head west out of Texas for spots more to our liking was that we knew we’d be heading east to Georgia at the end of summer. Corrinne’s parents came up from Mexico for a couple weeks and we wanted to see them. We knew we were going to drive and less driving the better.

Visiting family and friends in Athens sounded like a whole lot more fun than Wally World or Disney World or any other fake world. We’re awfully fond of the world we have, so why not try a good old fashioned road trip to Athens, GA?

We left the bus in Texas, but there was still no way we were going to drive 12 hours straight through. Jackson, Mississippi is roughly the halfway point, so we set about finding something fun to do in Jackson. Something better than wrecking our health or making a big fool of ourselves.

Corrinne discovered that the natural history museum was hosting a dinosaur exhibit complete with huge animatronic dinosaurs. Sold. We set out early Saturday morning and made Jackson by afternoon. The dinosaurs were a hit and the crowds weren’t too bad considering it was a weekend.

The rest of the museum wasn’t quite a nice as the traveling exhibit. It had a semi-broken down feeling to it and many of the stuffed specimens were old and ratty, but not really in a charming or understandable way like La Specula in Italy.

When in doubt, more dinosaurs.

After we’d had our fill of animatronic dinosaurs we had a mediocre dinner and crashed out in a hotel room.

You might think, after years on the road, that we’d be super-organized, super-efficient packers, but no, we’re not. It’s pretty much a chaotic sprawl of bags, clothes, electronics, and toys.

The next day we drove the rest of the way into Athens. Overall not to bad. Are we there yet did not reach cliche road trip fever pitch and no one got too grumpy. Or else I blocked all that out in my memory.

AirBnB we rented in Athens was a strange place though. We found and unplugged 15 air fresheners. No joke. Who lives that way? I suspect that many air fresheners put out enough petro chemicals to shorten your life by a measurable amount. Even without them, the place still smelled like someone was trying to cover up something awful.

At least the view across the street was good, some neighbor had a 1970ish Crown school bus at least partly converted to an RV. If we ever do the school bus conversion thing, the 60s and 70s Crown school buses would be high on my list. The mid-body diesel engine is awkward though, eats up all the room for your tanks. Not that I’ve put a lot of thought into this or anything.

I first came to Athens in 1999, moved here on a whim. I’ve never really felt at home anywhere except the wilderness, but Athens is probably as close as I come to having a home town at this point. Whatever the case, it’s always fun to come back for a visit. We wandered around, went to some of our old haunts, took the kids places they claim not to remember, ate some good food, even managed to put together a huge cousins sleepover party.

Around the time we were getting ready to head back to Texas, an opportunity to stay in Athens presented itself. Well, not stay in Athens exactly, but hang around the area for a few months. After thinking it over for about five minutes, we said sure, why not?

The next day I got in the rental car, drove it back to Texas, and returned it. Then I grabbed our stuff out of the bus, threw it in the Volvo, said goodbye to the bus for another little while, and headed back to Athens. Boom, done. The less you have the easier it is to drop it all and do something else.

Okay, so I forgot the silverware. No one is perfect. But one thing I’ve learned on the road is to trust our intuitions. If something feels right, it generally is. If something feels wrong, it’s time for change. It took quite a while and several second-guessing failures to get that confidence, but even those failures taught me that no matter what happens, things have a way of working themselves out in the end.