Holiday Road

I have missed a few weeks--mostly because I have been on the road. This will be my son's senior year of high school. So it made sense to pitch the family on a good ole Griswold style vacation. We had already planned to return to Iowa to see family and friends but decided to go ahead and commit to the additional thousand miles and get back to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone.

It was a good and noble idea but driving 6000 miles in 12 days is not for the faint of heart...really more a quest than a vacation. As Clark would say, we were on a #!*$%in quest for fun.

And it really was fun but in a different sort of way. Different from our daily routines and certainly different from the familiar avenues to entertainment that young people are used to today. Simply being within speaking distance of your children for hours at a time is a nice change and probably the very thing that we were looking for. A 6'3" kid can't hide in a Toyota, even a Land Cruiser... not for 12 hours in a row.

The other piece was getting back to the West. I love North Carolina. I love our mountains and I love the breadth of geography across the state. But I also love the West. To be able to look out a car window and literally see forty miles in every direction gives me a sense of freshness and freedom that I have not been able to find elsewhere. We hiked and camped and got tired--all things that work to remind you that fun is a much broader term than we often realize.

There is a lot to see and do in this world. I suspect that I will never be completely satisfied in my quests to see and do. But at the same time, periods of satisfaction are readily available to us--if we are just willing to give them a chance. Even though getting there was a trial in patience as well as endurance; and even though we only stayed a couple of days, I did leave renewed and refreshed. Even though it was modest, it was enough...at least for a while. It was good to simply behold and reconnect with a stretch of earth that is particularly powerful and meaningful. It was also good to spend time with my family...

Of course, there were also those moments when I could have tied Aunt Edna to the roof.