Have you always wanted to travel around the country?<\/p>\n
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I have married friends – one a secretary and the other a director of a professional association – who both decided to learn how to drive tractor trailer rigs a number of years ago. Their goal was to retire and to go on the road as long distance drivers. They thought it would be great fun to do that since they loved to travel and have dreamed for years of doing this.<\/p>\n
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Can you imagine the secretary – who is a prim and proper sort of woman – going to truck driving school with a bunch of guys? She had lots of fun and the stories she told of that experience were too long to tell here.<\/p>\n
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Their lives have taken different turns since then and I’m not sure if they will go on the road. They both retire in the next year or so.<\/p>\n
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I’m watching to see if they decide to do it.<\/p>\n
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When my son – Pierce – was nine we decided to take a trip around the country. I’d always wanted to do that and having Pierce plan the trip with me would be a good experience. Since I was working on a nine month contract in the public schools then and had the summers off we could easily make the trip in 30 days.<\/p>\n
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July was the month we decided to go. It took us four months of planning.<\/p>\n
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At first we decided to camp along the way. That was, until my mother and my Aunt from Wales decided to come along.<\/p>\n
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Seems traveling around the USA was their dream as well.<\/p>\n
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My Aunt Mary was used to cold and wet weather. Little did she know that it would be the hottest summer on record and we were getting ready to hit 100 plus degree temperatures in many of our destinations.<\/p>\n
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We set out the first day of July with a goal of driving no more than six hours a day. Since I was doing all the driving, that was about all I wanted to tackle.<\/p>\n
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The sites we saw along the way were awesome. We started picking up stones when we stopped to sightsee. To this day there is a shadowbox over my office desk with the stones. The “title” of the shadowbox is “Memory Rocks Around the USA in July 1995.”<\/p>\n
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We traveled through 21 different states on this trip.<\/p>\n
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One of the highlights of the adventure was sitting under the arch in St Louis listening to Tom Jones perform on July 4th. Since he grew up in Wales about 20 miles over the mountains from my mother and her sister…it was another dream come true for them to hear and see him perform live.<\/p>\n
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Other experiences included the South Dakota Badlands at 125 degrees; snow in the Rockies in July as we made snowballs in a snowstorm while dressed in summer clothes; seeing the Grand Canyon – another 100 degree plus day; and eating seafood on the Galveston, Texas coast for my birthday….right before a hurricane came inland.<\/p>\n
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For me it was the chance to drive around the country and see that, indeed, life in other locations was just like life here…it was just different scenery.<\/p>\n
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When we arrived home I took the van back to the rental company. I suspect I am the reason they don’t have unlimited mileage on rental vans anymore. 8500 miles later we pulled back into the yard.<\/p>\n
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My wish for you today<\/strong> is that you take the time to plan a trip with your children and\/or family and experience it to its fullest. It doesn’t have to be a 30 day trip around the USA, but the memories of that experience and the thoughts that will go into it will well be worth it. Happy planning.<\/p>\n \n ~ Joellen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you always wanted to travel around the country? I have married friends – one a secretary and the other a director of a professional association – who both decided to learn how to drive tractor trailer rigs a number of years ago. Their goal was to retire and to go on the road as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,16,27,23,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-pride","category-life-events","category-living-life-to-the-fullest","category-nature-events","category-teenagers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reflectionsfromacountrygirl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reflectionsfromacountrygirl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reflectionsfromacountrygirl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reflectionsfromacountrygirl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reflectionsfromacountrygirl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/reflectionsfromacountrygirl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reflectionsfromacountrygirl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reflectionsfromacountrygirl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reflectionsfromacountrygirl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}