How a Road Trip Becomes a Funeral Procession

People seem to think Aaron and I travel a lot, and I suppose that might be accurate. We’ve tried to see as much of the world as we can together. Aaron visited me while I was on study abroad in Rome in 2002, and I got to show him the city I had been calling home for four months. For spring break in 2005, we spent nine days in my Ford Focus, driving from Mount Pleasant to New Orleans, out to Texas, and back home—and we slept in the car for half of those nights. A trip from southern Illinois to Pittsburgh, PA to visit Aaron’s brother turned into a jaunt to Niagara Falls, because why not? And in 2012, we spent just over a week in India to shoot a promotional video for CMU. When Aaron has to travel for a work-related conference, I sometimes go with him so that we can spend more time together.

During the planning stages of this road trip, a lot of people were curious about how we thought it would go. Isn’t that a long time to be away from home? Do you think you can handle sleeping in a car for a month? How are you going to handle the day-to-day stuff, like hygiene and meals? But wouldn’t it be easier in a real camper? You’ll stay in hotels some of the nights, though, won’t you? (To answer that last one: yes, occasionally). Some people have even wondered what it will be like for us to spend that much time together, possibly because they are thinking of their own relationships and wondering if they could handle the same. A lot of people have told me they’re jealous of all the things we’ll see, but question how we’ll tolerate “roughing it” the way we’ve planned. But that’s the key: Aaron and I planned the kind of trip we wanted to take because of who we are and how we approach travel (and, ultimately, life).

We agree on a lot of things, but we each approach travel a little differently. It’s a combination of our personalities, plus how we were raised. He’s a planner; he likes to know all the details, figure out the logistics, know what’s going to happen at all times, and be able to plan for everything to go wrong. I need flexibility when I travel; I prefer to act on my whims, make unplanned stops, seek out weird or interesting places in the middle of nowhere, cut trips short or add days if I feel like it. Our common ground is that we want to experience as much as possible for as little money as possible, because we both grew up in frugal households. We’ve spent the years cultivating both our sense of adventure and our ability to work through all those not-so-perfect moments, because I’m prone to travel-induced meltdowns (but I’m working on it, and we both know the warning signs well enough to prevent the worst ones).

For us, traveling is also part of our identity as a couple. Even though we’ve known each other since elementary school, and have been friends with each other’s brothers for years, we didn’t really get to know each other until a class trip to Washington, D.C. seventeen years ago. I wasn’t even supposed to be on that trip; Aaron and my brother Steve were in the class, our moms and my grandma were chaperoning, and there was a space. Four days later, we knew we wanted to marry each other. Getting to share that experience as the basis of our relationship means a lot to both of us. I will forever owe a debt of gratitude to my Mom for helping me meet my husband—even though she didn’t plan that part. She was just helping me see more of the world outside Pinconning, any way she could find.

Mom taught me that it’s okay to want to escape everyday life sometimes. Some of my best memories with her are the impromptu trips that happened when she asked me, “Do you want to go somewhere?” and we’d just get in the car and end up at the beach in Tawas or at a county fair halfway across the state. She showed me that the unexpected can sometimes be better than the plan. She also taught me that traveling isn’t about destinations so much as experiences, especially when they can be shared with people you love, and if you can laugh about all the things that go wrong. Like the time when Mom, Aunt Vicky, and Gramma Rice visited me in Rome. We took a trip to Venice that resulted in us having to sleep outside on the steps of a church on some cardboard boxes because there were no hotels available. The four of us wore socks on our hands and had to use an alley as a bathroom, because the pay toilets closed at 9 pm. As miserable as it was, it was also one of the best experiences because we laughed so much at our own poor planning and misfortune.

Traveling doesn’t just show us more of the world; it forces us to question our place in it. We have to figure out where we’re going, but also where we’ve been. Each place leaves its mark on us, adding nuance to what we thought we knew about each place, the people in it, and ourselves. Even packing a suitcase (or in this case, the back of a hearse) requires some introspection: what do I think I will need to bring with me to experience where I’m going the way I want to? Gathering our possessions made us think about our expectations of the places we’re going, and ourselves. Aaron’s a Boy Scout through and through, so his goal was to increase our self-reliance, so that we can stop anywhere we want and have what we need.

The grind of everyday life can make it hard to see through the chaos and figure out what you really need, versus what you think you want. Traveling strips away those things: the nagging daily worries from work, the housework that’s never done, the shower that needs fixing, the other shower that also needs fixing—all of that can wait until you get home. Traveling, the way we do it, makes us feel more alive and more ourselves. We have to figure out how to meet our most basic needs, and the rest of what we do is completely up to us. To have that freedom is an invaluable gift, and it’s something I’m finding I need to help me process who I’ve become since losing my Mom.

Mom died 11 months ago yesterday. When I first got the phone call from the Midland ER, they told me they had my Dad there, but they didn’t know where my Mom was. In my panic and confusion, I thought that meant she had left the hospital and driven somewhere else. A few more phone calls while we drove east changed our route, because we had to make a choice which ER we were going to drive to, which parent we were going to see. Because Mom actually died in the helicopter, rather than at the site of the crash or in the ER itself, there is no “place” where her death happened for me. She lived a traveler, and she died one.

This trip is helping me to remember what she taught me about wanting to escape—or, in this case, needing to, in order to get back to myself. Traveling reminds me that none of us really have a set place in this world. We are all travelers; we just temporarily settle here until we go somewhere else. I want to enjoy this ride as long as I can.