On the road again: Car trip memories…

I hit the road last week; I didn't make it far out of town, but the drive landed me in a whole different dimension — the Winnipeg Folk Festival. This year marks the fiftieth (50th!!) anniversary of Manitoba’s beloved "people and music" festival to which people come from near and far. I was keen to attend because Allison Russell was playing on the main stage on opening night and I had never seen her perform live before. She did not disappoint. 

For many of us able to get out of town during the summer months, the call of a road trip can be a powerful thing — regardless of the destination. 

I’m no Jack Kerouac and I’ve never been close to Route 66, but I do love the open road. Not so much the getting ready for it, but the being on it. The turning of the wheels and the being on the way to somewhere. That, for me, is the allure of the road. 

I’ve never traveled on the road in a VW camper, though that is a fantasy that would exist on my bucket list if I had such a list. I would name the van ‘Daisy’ and I would want to have found her in an old fashioned newspaper ad, bought from someone who was sad to part with her but needing to pass her along. She would be a vintage model from, say 1971, refurbished, lovingly maintained and now ready for me as her new owner. I’d want her body to be that iconic burnt-orange colour, with a white roof that pops up and out for air to flow through once we had found our perfect stopping place — quiet, with a view, and no neighbours in sight or sound.

But all that is fantasy.

The road trips that are not fantasy are these from my own life —

In 1971, we took a family holiday in BC, driving the main roads and the side roads, from one beautiful national or provincial park to another, in a truck camper. It was exciting — exploring British Columbia, having camp fires, seeing bears, panning for gold in Barkerville. My memories are of good adventurous fun.

In 1982, my first girlfriend and I car camped our way from Edmonton to New York City and back again, all in a little Chevy sedan of some kind. I don’t remember much from this trip, and I can hardly believe that we navigated our way into and back out of New York City with nothing more than the CAA’s paper TripTik to guide us, but we did. Youth is a wonderful time to take to the open road and see where you can find yourself.

In 1986, my next girlfriend and I drove cross-country from Edmonton to Halifax for her first post-PhD job contract. We stuffed what possessions we could into the Toyota Tercel hatchback and took off, staying in motels along the way. With two nights in Montreal to visit a friend, it took us a total of 7 days to arrive in our new home. It took several days and a great deal of anxious searching to find a place to actually live. Which we did, living there happily for two years before driving back West to Winnipeg.

In 1997, I was well committed to Val and, together, we car camped from Winnipeg to Arizona in a VW Golf, leaving just after the April blizzard and returning home in time for the spring floods. In between, we saw the ups and downs of the Dakotas, the open spaces of Wyoming, and the beauty of Utah’s canyons where, one morning, we awoke to snow on the tent roof. My fondest memory is maybe of the desert-sun-heated water-bottle bird bath behind the rocks in Joshua Tree park. Our food was divided into breakfast, lunch and supper totes filled with dehydrated meals, because we were at the tail-end of the strict diet Val was on following her first diagnosis of cancer, so feeding ourselves from our own stores was important. That made meal prep both routine and predictable within the tight constraints of camp stoves and coolers.

Less predictable was our time in 1999 on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. We flew down, then rented a VW Beetle so we could explore the area—one day, bird watching, including colourful parrots; the next, we played in the ocean waves; another, we drove to quite literally a hole in the ground and went down steps to swim underground in a cenote. Another day, we climbed the ruins at Chichen Itza and enjoyed an outdoor lunch in Merida. But nothing, really, was better than the avocados bought from the local shop that we made into guacamole and had with a cold beer on the tiled terrace of our top-floor apartment overlooking the beach and the ocean. That view, the sun, the sky. The peace. Wow.

Once we owned the cottage on Lake Winnipeg, the only road trips we took were to and from that known location in our station wagon. We never did get the 'getting ready' part of those trips down to a science, but we always managed to get everything necessary packed in. Once loaded up, we motored along non-stop until we arrived at our destination. No dilly dallying along the way for us on those trips; they were all about getting to where we were going.

No matter where they take you, road trips create long-lasting memories and seed stories that get passed down through the family or friend group. The best road trips include good snacks, interesting conversation and great radio, all in a car sufficiently comfortable to make the trip itself enjoyable.

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NOTE: This piece was sparked by an old fashioned newspaper ad that included mention of a VW Beetle for sale; I riffed on that to bring forth my fantasy  about the VW camper and, from there, I jogged down memory lane, weaving a tale from the various road trips I've been on in different vehicles over the course of my life. Pulling them together into this story reminds me how a road trip does much more for us than get us from A to B; it sets us up for being there. And teaches us, too, that the journey is no less important than the destination. When it all comes together, the whole is, indeed, greater than the sum of its parts.  

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

VW camper photo by Stas Bezukh on Unsplash