With a few exceptions, we don’t know where we’re going on this trip. Occasionally, it seems like we’re trying to disprove the line “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” Often, we wake up in the morning, and say where shall we go today? Right or left? South or north? Ocean or mountains? It’s both a liberating and unsettling feeling. No agenda? No goal? No place to be tonight? Really. You must belong somewhere. We could get in the car and sit in the Target parking lot and it wouldn’t matter to anyone but ourselves (including the kids). Or we could drive to the airport and grab seats on a plane to Tulsa. And fake it from there. It’s a good feeling, but not always.
If you want to have a true adventure, it seems to me that you don’t want to have it planned out before you step foot outside the door. You’ve planned from the perspective of where you are then, which for us, anyway, was the very limitation we were tying to overcome. If you follow me.
It’s not easy maintaining that attitude. “Where are you going?” your friends and family ask, with a little more intensity as the time to leave approaches. We don’t know, we say. To New England, and after that we’ll have to see. Maybe Nicaragua or St. Petersburg. Charleston. Barcelona. Our brains, too, fight the vacuum, trying develop at least the skeleton of an agenda. We picked New England because at some point you have to point the car in one direction or another, and because we’d heard so often about the magnificent fall colors.
From there, your guess is as good as mine.
Question: Are you really on a true adventure if you’ve planned everything out in advance? Don’t you need the possibility of reacting to the experience of the trip itself? To at least decide on which road you want to take?
Ann eating a runza at a drive-in in Grand Island. One lady stopped and asked: Is the doll going to eat that all by herself? Ann let it go. A runza, if you haven’t had one, is a yeast dough bread pocket with a filling of beef, pork, cabbage or sauerkraut, and onions. Originating in Russia in the 1800s, it was brought to the United States by the Russian-Germans in the early 1900s. Runza restaurants are as common in Nebraska as McDonalds or Burger Kings.