wonderlust engage.

                                The art of Whimsy and spontaneity is lost I think in many ways. I find it one of most important things we can hold. It keeps us young it keeps us from being crushed by life. The ability to be dumb and loud and silly is the most important thing we loose as we age. Seriousness of life can drowns it out from our lives. As I planned a trip yesterday with my husband and we wrote our dreams for this time away, we both struggled to actually hope we could do all the things we wanted to do to find something that fit us and was what we wanted not what we thought we needed. I can think of few of our trips that have been just what we wanted out of it we make considerations here and changes there to accommodating both each other and our budgets needs. Some times it is what we wanted some times it is what we settled for. I have never been so excited about a trip in years I can not stop thinking about it I want so badly to be go now all ready and packed.

                       I never had thought about our trip this way before. I think this has relaunched my love of travel that had been sucked dry by the utilitarian ways in witch we have traveled in the last maybe more than 10 years. I feel like a kid excited about Christmas coming the day after it came for the next year. I am going to be working very hard this year to be ready, seams so silly to me that this is going to be be the thing that motivates me to make so many of the changes I want to make. I think it is that finding a piece of us that has been gone too long the couple that woke up one night years ago and just took off for the week not even knowing where we were going. We had so much fun I forgot we were still there. I loved finding them again even if they are a little smarter and planned to have money for gas and food when they go. But I can not wait to travel with them again!

Romance of the road

My sister has been posting about herecar trip outwest with her family and it has been making me remember the trips we would take as kids in the back seat, no seatbelts, actually the one trip Dad took a piece of wood and made the back seat into a bed.

No, we did not have a van, we were four people crammed into a 5 passanger car, sometimes 7 people crammed into the car if we met up with someone like my grandparents and I had to ride in the trunk, ok, well the hatch back or up on the shelf back window. We would drive for time and distance. Every time we stopped Dad would say "We are makin good time". I always wondered as opposed to what the other drivers who are not going where we are.

The trips always started in our house at like 3 am, on the road by 4 at the latest. Therewas endless singing of songs either by my parents or my sister and I,  each being horrified by harmonizing of the other, then there I was getting the words wrong just to bug my sister. The  constant look out the window, if you are bored there is so much to see, you know boring people get bored, there is away something to do, of course shortly followed by "Stop kicking my seat".

This was the days before cell phones, and everyone had some sort of scream in front of them at all times. Man, How did we make it? We as a family several times a year would drive down south at least once, usually twice, we made it to my grandmother's house one time in Arkansas in around 11 hours, when the fastest time before that was 13 hours. But this was after the fuzz buster (police radar detector) made it into our lives and we would race random people on the Highway at night with my sister or I running interference for my dad with the garage opener. See, the first ones you could fool the other driver into slowing down by pressing the garage door opener really fast making the other person think a Police officer was near.

I really liked those times, for a house that hardly ever got junk food it was heaven, dry cold pop tarts for breakfast, chips to snack on and soggy lunch snadwiches from the cooler filled with mostly water. There the moments striking lack of parenting like when because Mom and Dad would not pay 3 dollars a piece for 2 cotton in the shell in a bag they made us steal it from a field. They didn't even get out to help us, they sent 2 fairly young girls out into a feild in Louisiana to steal it and put it in the sandwich bag from our soggy lunch sandwiches.

I remember vividly shopping in flea markets and getting the super cool Don Johnson coat with the big fruit all over it that no one at school would have, not because it was hidiously ugly as you would assume (it was by the way) ,but because it was from New Orleans. The random back hills hillbilly stalking your family in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, podunk after staring at your licence plate for a good 10 minutes while you ate dinner and watched him silent fear.

ya know getting the flavor of the place experiencing culture, or lack of.

I do not know that this post is anything more than a tribute to the family car trip on the open road but there is so much more with that than just hitting the airport and taking off. there just seemed to be more time to just be thinking in those days. I am a fan of the airport and take off, get there enjoy were you wanted to go longer and in 4 hours as opposed to 2 days. but there is a love and romance for me in the ride there in the dirtiest backwoods bathroom to the really cool little place you find in the middle of nowhere on the way, that makes the trip. Most of my memories of the trips and fun of it were the times we were filling time in the car. I think it was the first time as a kid I was forced to get to know my parents as people. The most interesting things happened there, the love of getting there  taking the time for the unexpected detoures and twists and adventure of it all make the trip.