Gab:
- Is it over?
-How was The Trip?
-Did you get to all the places you wanted to see?
-Are you sad to be back?
I should probably have some standard responses by now. There has been no conversation/email/phone call since Christmas that didn’t include one or more of these questions. Most of the time all of them at once, showered on me like confetti.
The short answers:
-No, not yet.
-Great. Wonderful. Better than we ever could have dreamed.
-Kind of.
-No! Yes! Kind of….
I am flattered by the inquiries. They mean that my friends, colleagues and even acquaintances noticed that I was gone. In fact, many of them followed our adventures pretty faithfully, either online or via the Sunday Travel Section in the Patriot News every month.
But the newspaper gig ended in January and with such a backlog of site reviews, it is hard to tell where we are anymore just by checking the site. So, about once a week we get an email from one of our pals wondering,
“Where are you? Are you finished yet?”
It is a legitimate question. But I am never prepared to answer. Somehow, even after months of practice, I get caught off guard. I start to stutter and go off onto this long-winded explanation of the park sites that are remaining and how we have to wait until Memorial Day to go back to New England and the dozens of DC sites are just a short drive away and….At this point, my listener’s eyes start to glaze and I wonder if I am that person that people wish they never would have sat next to on the bus.
Why is it so hard for me to say that we are back to work full-time now? That we just rented a beautiful apartment in downtown Harrisburg? That the Nissan is in the parking lot getting some much deserved rest and waiting patiently for a car wash? Hey man, after a solid 18 months of living out of our car and sleeping on the ground and coming up with new stories as to why we are in This Town, Texas or That City, Iowa when it didn’t seem like the 2-year cross country road trip explanation was going to cut it with the audience, we are once again legit.
Sigh. A moment of silence, please.
Some days, most days actually, this is a wonderful feeling. I am a Taurus and a nester by nature. I am doing now what I longed to do many times at the end of a long drive: unpack, unwind, stretch out, relax in a space that was my own. Not worry about who might pull into the campsite next to us, where the car is parked or if our gear is safe in the cheap motel room while we go grab something to eat.
Other days, being “legit” doesn’t seem to suit me at all. Like today, as I sit at my laptop pounding out emails for work at 11 pm on a Sunday night and mentally preparing myself for what I know will be a grueling week. I think to myself, this time last year, I was in Arizona, watching baseball at spring training, exploring ancient cliff dwellings, hiking through fields of cacti and strange lava formations, getting ready to drive to Santa Fe to celebrate one year on the road with a delicious meal.
This week marks the two-year anniversary of USA-C2C.
I have to keep reminding myself that It Is Not Over Yet.
This is hard now that we finally have a couch, I found my favorite fuzzy bathrobe and I spend my Saturday morning, not mapping out the best route from the motel to the nearest coffee shop to the visitors center, but exploring alternate routes between the Ikea and the Trader Joes from the PA Turnpike.
It will be hard, but not impossible.
There are at least six large boxes of things we mailed home from the road. Pamphlets, maps, books we finished reading, coasters, magnets, free stuff we won in trivia contests. They are postmarked from Florida, Montana, Washington, California. I am trying to pick the right day to delve into those treasure chests and unearth the booty.
Would I be exaggerating if I said we had at least a hundred thousand photos of the trip? I don’t think so. The next step is to frame our favorites and cover these empty walls with the scenes I need to see again to know that they really happened.
Our acquired knick-knacks won’t be mementos; they will be miniature monuments to the places where they were found. The photos won’t serve as memorials to the last two years, but as motivators. Motivators to continue what we started, to practice what we have been preaching about making time not finding it, to finally visit every single national park area in the continental United States.
Whatever that number may be.