It's about the journey and the friendship

Ignoring, for a moment, the skyrocketing price of gas and increasing perils of global warming, I have to admit that road tripping is my favorite means of travel.

You see, most commonly we think of travel as a destination; our vacation begins when we settle into the hotel room of some distant locale. With a road trip, however, the adventure begins on that first stretch of highway not five miles from home. Road trips invite adventurers to explore, mile by mile, the 99% of America that doesn’t merit newsprint outside their local rag.

Before my first major road trip in 1998, I believed that beyond our national forests lay the tarred remains of nature, having been pummeled by pavement. But on that month-long coast-to-coast crawl, I found the opposite: quaint small towns surrounded by indigenous landscape, be it trees, pasture or unadulterated desert.

This most recent bout of pavement conquering came of necessity: my good friend, Chelsea, was transferred to the Chicago branch of her place of business. I’ll admit that leading up to the trip, I was nervous at the prospect of driving for two days in the 17-foot self-moving truck Chelsea had reserved – but all for naught. Murphy’s Law ensured that the rental company would be fresh out of that size, leaving us to spread her belongings in one even layer along the bottom of a massive 26-footer.

To the back of this monstrosity of a mover, we strapped her Rav4 mini-SUV like the business end of a ball-and-chain mace, ready to swing around and pulverize parked cars with the slightest flick of the wrist.

At least, that’s how it felt. The largest vehicle I had previously driven was an oversized pickup truck; Chelsea’s previous experience involved a smaller rental truck which she unintentionally used to strip the gutters off a motel.
Thus began the kind of three-day ab workout that comes of clenching your gut in fear.

It was a trip filled with the usual road blunders, like realizing the gas gauge is on empty with no filler station in site; and some less common mishaps, like Chelsea hitting a speed bump, literally, while running her dog and sliding to a halt on bare kneecaps. In northern Indiana, we were approached by a frightening red-faced truck driver who offered this trucking advice: “Just drive it!”

And drive it, we did: through the tall thick trees of Tennessee and into Kentucky where the trees become smaller and sparser. In Indiana, we saw agribusiness compounds with huge mysterious sheds that may have held animals, crops or machinery, and small farms with clusters of cows gathered together under trees in the middle of large enclosures. And, finally in Illinois, I got my first look at a Great Lake which, just as Chelsea promised, was so expansive that I could have mistaken it for an ocean.

Surprisingly enough, we never once rammed the Rav4 into an unsuspecting compact car or got the truck cornered somewhere requiring that we delve into the no-man’s-land of reverse.
What we did do, however, was reinforce our friendship during the hours that come after the excited starting-out chatter gave way to the thoughts coerced by quiet stretches of road that roll on like a guided meditation.

Monday morning, I waved to Chelsea from the back seat of a taxi, with previously unknown muscles aching but content in the knowledge that I saw another 800 miles of America at the side of a friend.

This article was first printed in the News and Record on July 12, 2006