After months and months of planning, I finally found myself faced with one of the great American traditions -- the family road trip. Just like Chevy Chase's classic Clark Griswold, I was set to load up the kids in an oversized vehicle and set out to see Washington D.C.
Of course, it wasn't quite the same as the Griswold clan. For starters, this was the first real trip that the kids have taken with either parent since the divorce. They've taken little side trips to Chicago, Detroit and Indianapolis, but those places are only a few hours away from home. Plus, in the cases of Indy and the Motor City, really those are just visits to see family.
No, this was a (sort of) honest-to-goodness vacation. One that was extremely well earned... you know, since it basically took a court intervention to figure out when the trip could take place, for how long, etc. Since I knew people spending the year in D.C. to work on research, I had broached the idea of the trip back last summer, when I originally wanted to tie the journey to my niece's wedding in Philadelphia in October. It took till late September to come up with the alternative arrangements of going over the boys' Spring Break.
There was an agreement that all of the driving wouldn't be done in one day, so that led to leaving late on a Thursday. I had agreed that the boys could spend a little bit of time with their mother prior to us leaving, which meant that I had to got get them before we could hit the road.
Once they were done saying their goodbyes and just as I was getting into the van, their mom looked at me through narrowed eyes and said, "If anything happens to them..."
She didn't finish that sentiment, but I'm sure that was just to leave it to my imagination. It wasn't the warmest send off I've received, but as I drove away, I had trouble mustering much anger about it. While it isn't how I would've expressed it, I understood the feeling of having the children going away for a period of time... even if it, in reality, was only five days. It took a really long time to get used to not seeing my children every day, and it isn't really that you become comfortable with it... it's more that you force yourself to stop thinking about it.
Taking a road trip these days is light years away from when I was a kid. My siblings are so much older than me, that I didn't have the experience of being crammed into a backseat with other kids. My memories are from being in the backseat alone... with nothing to do but listen to the radio, stare out the window or read. In my minivan, the boys have dual DVD players where they can either watch the same thing or two separate things. They have their iPad. They have their Nintendo DS. And, sure, they still had the books and the radio.
For the first two hours on the road, Martin and Casey didn't say a word. Not to me. Not to each other. Nothing. They were each watching a DVD and were so engrossed that they could've been anywhere. By the time that they were paying attention again, we had gone from Michigan to Indiana and were now in Ohio.
We made it to our overnight destination of Cleveland in decent time. Martin has had to read a story set in Cleveland during the '70s and he was surprised to find that the Cuyahoga River wasn't on fire. I had to tell him that the city isn't as bad as it was when I was a kid. "Cleveland looks pretty nice to me," he said. I told him not to go too crazy.
With the trip underway, the boys ended the day with the one part of the vacation that they most cared about... the pool. As I was booking hotels the only question that they ever had was, "Does it have a pool?" When I told Casey to pack, I came back to find just a pair of flip-flops in the suitcase. When I asked if that was all he was planning on taking, the response that I got was, "Well, I couldn't reach my swimsuit in the closet." I had to explain that Washington D.C. is absolutely nothing like Fort Lauderdale... but that just led to him wanting to know if we can go to Florida next Spring Break.
They only got to swim for a short time, since there's a long day of driving ahead, but that was fine with them. For me, though, having the trip actually underway feels a little bit like Christmas morning. After all of the anticipation, there's that slight let-down when you realize that things are probably going to go quick from here.
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