Epilogue

Happy Memorial Day.

We’ve been home for two days. Mom and Helen stopped by yesterday and we tortured them by showing them all of the pictures we took (2,413 … but to be fair I did whittle the final count down to 1,269). They were here all afternoon and into the evening and all we did was talk about our trip … and our family. Today we’ll see Jack, Leslie, and Kieran at breakfast and we’ll talk about it even more. Even when it’s just Laura, Max and me—all we’re doing is talking about what we just did and where we had been.

Thanks to all of you that commented on the blog, or who texted or told me you enjoyed it, and those of you that just enjoyed it from afar. The purpose of this little online journal was to keep my writing muscles working, and to document this trip in order to keep the memory of what we did fresh and alive. If it had a secondary benefit and kept a few of you amused, then that’s very cool.

Tomorrow it’s back to work—always a tough one for me—and I would have thought after three weeks off from work it would be particularly difficult to get myself psyched up to go back. But it’s not that tough, really. First of all, I like my job, thank goodness … but even more than that I’m not going back to work feeling like my time away wasn’t enough. Do I want to get back in the car with Laura and Max and do another three weeks? Absolutely. But when I think about it, we went into this whirlwind with such an ambitious and detailed itinerary, that now that it’s finished I feel like we’ve accomplished something. We had a goal … we had specific things we wanted to do … and we did them. It’s a bit different than sitting on the beach for a week and coming home wanting another week of sitting on the beach. (By the way, I always want another week of sitting on the beach.)

Our road trip was always about two things: seeing the incredible beauty and diversity of this amazing country, and along the way seeing family and friends—many of whom we hadn’t seen for a very long time … and may not see for a long time from now.

Both were amazing.

This country is amazing: filled with amazing monuments like the gleaming Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the audacious Mount Rushmore, the beautiful and bizarre Hearst Castle, the stunning State Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, the grand setting of the Griffith Observatory in LA, and the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge (the perfect combination of engineering and art). And the incredible natural wonders we saw: The Smoky Mountains in Virginia and Tennessee, the never ending plains of Kansas, the unbelievable Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Bryce and Zion in Utah (still the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen), Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, Crater Lake—as I remember them all, gooseflesh rises on my arms. And then there were the cities: St. Louis, Denver, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Cleveland … all of them vibrant and alive, the next one completely different than the one before.

But even more than all of that were the personal connections and re-connections that took place. Chelsea, Holly and Brendan and Liam, Guy and Francesca, Barbara, Kirk, David and Sherry, Joyce and Wes, Don and Liz (and all our other wonderful relatives in the North West), Brian (and in absentia Dan and Liz); and our new friends in Chicago: Antony, Patti, and Marshall. All of them, without exception, stopped everything they were doing, opened up their homes to us, and showed us what made their hometowns special. There was never enough time to do everything … but the brevity of our visits created a concentrated urgency to share as much love as we could in the short amount of time we had. I knew it would be great to see all of you … but I truly didn’t expect the emotional wallop I felt as it all happened. I’ll say it again: How lucky am I to have family and friends like these? How lucky are all of us?

After all that, what struck me was how friendly the strangers were. You get jaded, living your everyday life, thinking so many people are selfish and surly and rude. Yeah, those people are out there, but there are also so many smiles, so many laughs, so many helping hands … coming in all shapes and sizes and colors.

But the best thing about the trip? No doubt about it: Three weeks driving in a car with my wife and son. Nothing else comes close. Maybe it’s not for everyone. Maybe a lot of people would look at the prospect of being cramped in a car with people for that period of time and say, “No thanks.” Sure, there are those moments where you might lose it just a little bit, but that’s what we humans do sometimes. But even as I planned this trip long ago, I was convinced it wouldn’t be that way for us. And I was right.

So, what did we do, stuck in a car together for three weeks? We had countless bouts of wild laughter. We discussed what was happening in our lives, and talked of what was yet to come. We soaked in remembrances of the day before, not wanting to forget a thing. And we talked of years ago … the moments of our lives that brought us to this point in time. But most of all we enjoyed the special covenant of long, comfortable silences as we drank in the scenery of this magnificent country as it flew by us at seventy miles per hour … happy to have this time together. Just us. Just our little family.

Final song of the day: “Long May You Run” by Neil Young.