Armchair Traveling

I love road trips. When I was a kid, we would pack up the Suburban and go off for 3 weeks, camping and exploring. The first day, my dad would make us get up at 4 am, and we'd stumble, sleepily, out to the car. We slept sprawled out in the back, without seatbelts of course, just lying on top of all the camping gear. We'd all go back to sleep and dad would gleefully get in a good 4 hours of driving before anyone asked to go to the restroom.

We don't do that--my husband is a night owl, not an early bird--but this summer we are planning a family two-week road trip to the 4 corners area of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah & Colorado. We'll see some sights (lots of sights & sites), and have some extraordinary experiences. The kids have put their orders in--they want to climb to the top of a mountain, hike, boulder scramble, rock hound, visit a mine, eat pie, search for fossils and creek hop. Me? I want family time and a chance to get out of the Houston summer swamp and breathe mountain air. And Mr. Dewberry (Asterix) will be happy with a few brew pubs and sight-seeing that part of the country. He grew up overseas, so he's been to amazing places all across the world, but he's woefully inexperienced in the kind of Great American road trip that I cut my teeth on every summer. Tech geek that he is, he's already made a nice Google map with all our stops and sights nicely outlined with pegs.

Where my husband has my dad beat, hands-down, is in his pleasure in ambling along. With my father, we were always trying to get to our destination as quickly as possible. Asterix, like me, likes quirky out-of-the-way stops off the Interstates and doesn't mind taking 8 hours to get somewhere you could get in 4. Even when we were dating, he'd say, "Wanna take a fun cut?" which was always a scenic route, as opposed to a direct short cut.

To that end, I have a plethora of books (Family Fun in fill-in-the-blank and others), and have immersed myself in reading about out-of-the-way hamlets, roadside attractions and snake museums. In some ways, the anticipation and the planning is as much fun as the actual adventure. And, although, we can't go everywhere, I have had a great time figuring out some of the possibilities and filing away others for the future.

And many thanks to my friend Astro D, as she seems to have salted the area with letterboxes in many of just those wacky out-of-the-way places that fit our plans to a T. Of course, we already were planning on staying in a wigwam in Holbrook, AZ and then she went and planted a letterbox there (fate)!

More on plans later, but if anyone wants to make not-to-be-missed box suggestions, I'm interested.