2007
it’s a long way down the holiday road
maura @ 10:26 pm
With the holidays of course there’ve been cards + gifts in the mail recently, so I’ve been thinking a lot about friends + family. Sometimes it seems like so many of them are far away and I wonder how it got to be like this, that we can’t see lots of our favorite people as often as we’d like (even some of our NYC friends, though of course we see them more often than the non-NYCers).
In high school I had this vague dreamy hope that one day I would live in a big house with all of my friends. And then I went to college and made more friends, but it was no big deal because the high school friends would like the college friends so we’d just need a bigger house, right? And then the grad school friends and the work friends and…
Of course that plan is unrealistic. I mean, not everyone wants to live in NYC, and I don’t want to live in many other places. Plus partners, jobs, kids, schools — everything is infinitely more complicated now.
So then I thought, well, what we need is a really long road trip. Like 4-6 weeks or so. Then we could visit everyone. Here’s how it’d go:
Brooklyn to Philly
Philly to Delaware
Delaware to D.C.
D.C. to North Carolina
North Carolina to Orlando
Orlando to Miami
Miami to Houston
(maybe a quick stop in New Orleans on the way, even though no one we know is there)
Houston to Dallas
Dallas to Southern California
(with stops at the Grand Canyon, Mojave, Death Valley, some cool stuff in New Mexico…hey, this is a dream trip, I can go whatever convoluted way I want to!)
Southern California to San Francisco
San Francisco to Reno
Reno to Portland
Portland to Seattle
Seattle to St. Louis
(via Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, the Badlands, the Corn Palace, Wall Drug, and Minneapolis)
St. Louis to Chicago
Chicago to Indiana
Indiana to Cincinnati
Cincinnati to Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh to Vermont
(via Niagara Falls and Ithaca)
Vermont to New Hampshire
New Hampshire to Boston
Boston to Connecticut
Connecticut to Brooklyn
…plus a quick flight to London and back.
Whew! After that trip odds are I would never want to get into a car again.
2 comments on “it’s a long way down the holiday road”
Good to know. I did the Kansas drive as a kid — we lived in Columbia MO for 2 yrs and drove to Denver one summer for vacation — it is brutally dull, that’s for sure.
if you ever do make that seattle-stl trip, you would be very wise to avoid the idaho/wyoming/utah/kansas route. it’s horribly boring. actually i wish we could have done more sightseeing on those trips.