Road Trip Dreaming

“We’re going to get in our Expedition and drive north and west.”

That was the most exciting sentence between bites of veal parmigiana Saturday night as we chatted about travel and retirement with our only-a-little-older-than-us friend who now lives with his wife in an active adult community in Florida.

I visualized them driving their aptly-named vehicle north on I-95. Or maybe they’ll cruise along US 1 instead, enjoying the slower pace of the backroads. Their informal destination that week might be Maine, but they have no formal plan. They’ll drive for a few hours, stop when they see something interesting, check into a hotel or campground. At some point they’ll turn west and visit states as far west as the Dakotas, then maybe south through Utah or Arizona or wherever their whims direct them.

Their plan is to spend two months on the road. Two. Months. With no agenda other than discovery.

Back in the 1970s I had that same dream. I even bought a van with the idea of customizing it for a long road trip, maybe six months. Jack Kerouac’s beat generation meets the hippie generation.  On the road in my bright yellow van, starting east from New Orleans, in my case, then north, west, and so on.

My wanderlust was born during annual 2-week family road trips during an otherwise anchored youth. We visited neighboring Mississippi and Texas, plus Alabama, Georgia, Florida, New Mexico, Tennessee, Virginia and DC. My first solo road trip was during my first year in college.

My dream of a six month road trip was interrupted by career success, but my travel bug was ultimately fed by jobs in states as far from home as Wisconsin, Illinois and Maryland. I did drive back to New Orleans from those places often, so I found suitable substitutes, even if only for a week at a time instead of six months.

Since those early days of road trip dreaming, I've visited at least 40 of the 50 states. Some trips were on the road, some by train, some by plane.

I’m now at the peak of my career and I love my job, but I think about retirement literally every day. I don’t plan to ever completely stop working, but I still want to find a way to take that 6-month road trip. Or some long version of it. I have the perfect travel partner and she has a similar dream.

Somehow, someday, we will find the work-life balance formula that enables us to hit the road while we’re still young enough and healthy enough to enjoy the adventure. Maybe we’ll be sharing road stories and veal parmigiana with our friend and his wife in some little town in Vermont or Wyoming.