When some people hear that we make regular trips by car to the Northeast to visit family I get a look that is somewhere between amazement and pity, especially when I admit that we do it with two young children. “Better you than me,” I sometimes hear! I like a good road trip; when I don’t take one for a while I yearn for the road. Road trips can be an amazing experience. We’ve always taken long trips in the car. Fortunately, none of them have resembled a National Lampoon parody.
We’ve only had a handful of brief nightmarish experiences along the way, like the trip where we were stuck in construction traffic and our first child, less than a year old, screamed for hours from the backseat because that’s what she did whenever the car stopped moving. Then there was the dog that became uncharacteristically ill while we were still hours from our destination. In a snowstorm. As it turns out, snowballs can be handy cleaning tools.
Road trips aren’t for everyone. If you hate to drive, or you experience road rage easily, driving thousands of miles is probably not for you. If your family is not used to spending a lot of time in 50 square feet of space or your children are not easily entertained, again, a road trip might not be the most relaxing way to get somewhere. But, if you can plan, prepare, and be patient, a road trip can be a lot of fun.
When I was a kid we didn’t have DVD players or iPods. Today we have a rule in our car: the
DVDs only come out if we’re traveling for two hours or more, and even then we have electronic-free periods as needed. We still play car games from my childhood. On a three thousand mile trip a couple of years ago, we saw all but one or two US license plates. I remember how excited we were to spot Alaska in a rest stop. (I may or may not have been more excited than the kids.)
As the primary road trip driver in our household (I say it’s because my wife doesn’t like highway driving. She says she doesn’t like to drive when I’m the passenger. Semantics.), it helps me to have a destination and a goal. I like to get where I’m going, although after a couple of pregnancies and small children I’m much more content to make pit stops along the way. Small bladders will do that. After DVD players, the best thing to happen to road trips, in my estimation, is Google Maps with live traffic updates. I can’t remember traveling without it.
More important than anything else, however, is learning this secret: a road trip is about the journey itself, not just what lies between us and our destination. In some ways the American road trip is our nation’s version of the spiritual pilgrimage. If we can find a way to bring meaning to the journey it is less aggravating, and dare I say, can even be life giving. Enjoying the vistas and local flavor along the way; creating memories with those we love; even using the hours behind the wheel to think through some of life’s big questions; all of these activities are but a few examples of how we can bring meaning to the endless miles of road we travel.
Life itself, we often learn too late, isn’t all about our destination. Just ask Ralph Waldo Emerson, who may or may not have learned this from his own early road trips in early cars: “Life is a journey, not a destination.” It’s not about the accumulation of the right amount of stuff. It’s not about reaching retirement. It’s not about some great achievement upon which we have set our personal value. Life is about the journey itself and what we choose to do along the way, the relationships we form, and the meaning we find for ourselves and help make for others. Lest we think otherwise, the lifelong Christian journey is no different in this regard; the journey is as important as the destination. If our daily life were only the mechanism that gets us to some distant destination, than we are surely to be pitied.
Instead, we can learn to set our destinations and also enjoy the route along the way. We can survive the side of the road experiences that come with illness or accidents, and we can certainly navigate around them with the road maps some of us find through our faith. It’s the season for road trips, and spiritual journeys are always in order. Wherever yours takes you, I hope the trip is full of meaning and blessings along the way.
