OK, so you've decided to pack your family into the car, along with roughly all of your worldly belongings plus two months worth of food, and set out to see as much of the country as you can before you can no longer resist the temptation to stick at least one kid on the roof rack.
Why are you doing this? Isn't it easier (albeit more expensive) to just fly to your destination? What about staying home? What was so wrong with your home in the first place that you felt a need to leave it? After all, home has, literally, all the comforts of home (hence the name). What are you hoping to get out of this madcap adventure?
The answer is... well, there are a lot of answers. After fifteen years of road trips, we still look forward to it, and everyone - adult and child alike, prefers it to flying. Here are just a few of the reasons why:
Making memories: In a world where everyone is busier than ever, and where even time together is time spent apart, thanks to smartphones and other devices, there is nothing like a road trip to provide you with oodles and oodles of family time together. Of course, a lot of that time is just time spent staring out the window or time spent staring at devices (more on both of those topics in future posts), but when you spend 30-40 hours crammed together in 150 cubic feet over the span of a couple of weeks, you're going to create some memories that will stay with you long after you forget about your foot falling asleep or the cheerios that became permanently bonded to the floor. Instead, my kids will tell you about doing aerobics at rest stops, or 76 sets of rules for the license plate games, or strange places that we stopped because I wanted to see something, or games of Riff-off that lasted across several state lines, or every different sleeping arrangement we have ever had in a hotel room. Those memories, seemingly insignificant, become the glue that makes a family into an experience.
Seeing the small things: My wife and I have different winter breaks, and thus every January, as my children's friends are flying off to Florida or the Bahamas, we are stuck back in the cold and snowy Northeast, trying to find enough day trips to fill the week.
However, while they have yet to see those sunny destinations, my kids have infinitely more to talk about from their time on the road. They have been in almost 20 states - and counting. They have seen the statue of the World's Tallest Man (Robert Wadlow - Alton, Illinois) and been to the future birthplace of Captain Kirk (Riverside, Iowa). They have traversed the Green Mountains (Vermont) and the White Mountains (New Hampshire), and will hopefully see the Blue Ridge Mountains (North Carolina) one day. They are budding experts on where to get the best ice cream in the country (It's a tough call), and they have bought corn from an Iowa roadside stand and peaches in Indiana. They have driven through blinding sun, blinding rain, and blinding snow. You don't get that on your flight to Miami.
Flexibility: This is an aspect that may be more appealing to the adults. When we fly, my wife begins monitoring flights and prices three to four months before the actual trip. While that works for us, as we often know our travel dates well in advance, not everyone has the leisure of being that organized. Beyond that, sometimes it's nice just to see where life takes you. While our road trip is often well planned out, we rarely have to make serious commitments beyond lodging reservations, and even those can often be made just a few days in advance. We have shown up at hotels without a reservation because weather conditions have forced us to stop driving (helpful hint: don't drive to Detroit in January). We have had the freedom to decide how much driving we want to do in a day - all driving or should we throw in an activity or two?
Price: I suppose this goes without saying, and it may be the reason you first started thinking about a road trip. As a family of seven, plane tickets to anywhere would cost us upwards of $2000 in most cases, and that is before we do anything. Even factoring in gas, wear and tear on the car, and hotel stays, our trip usually comes out waaaay below that - for everything. Granted, we spend most nights at people's homes, but there is no way we could afford to fly from city to city to see all of those people.
There are many more advantages of road trips, and, let's face it, that's the entire point of this blog. Stay tuned for more in upcoming posts.
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