Day 2 of our road trip, and here's a map for those of you who have (understandably) expressed doubt that it could actually take us 5000 miles to cross the country. Our plan is to take 29 days (lots of stops to see friends and family).
And here we are on Day 1 (yesterday), about to get into the car in the leafy lovely suburbs of Baltimore, looking very tired after our crazy week of packing and moving:
I can't really tell you much about the drive from Baltimore to Raleigh yesterday, as I was asleep for most of it. Sleep (along with showers and giggling contests with my son) is something that has recently been missing from my life. I intend to make up for that in the next few weeks.
Yesterday was mostly notable for us being 4 1/2 hours late to an appointment. Joel had set up a meeting with a prof at Duke, as he's starting to look at PhD programs in Biblical Hebrew. I guess 4 1/2 hours late wasn't too bad considering that we were 48 hours late moving out of our house (luckily the new folks weren't moving in quite yet), and 22 hours late leaving Baltimore (so much for my visions of walking out of my Departmental Oral Exams and getting into my waiting car and driving off into the sunset... we still had packing and cleaning to do). Fortunately the prof Joel was going to meet with was still on campus when we arrived, and they had a nice meeting, and I wandered the halls with William and discovered that Lauren Winner's office was 3 doors down.
Then we drove to our friends' house, ate dinner, watched Olympics, crashed.
I gave this post a silly title, and this morning I was thinking about my grandma's Oregon trail experience back in the early 1930s. She was a salt of the earth type, a woman of few words who I think barely knew the internet existed when she died earlier this year, who worked hard, lived through tragedy (deaths of two husbands), and showed her love through cooking meals and crocheting large afghans. She grew up poor in Arkansas (where she got malaria, true story) and it was the dustbowl years and her farmer father knew they had to get out. He had fought in World War I and so the story goes that at some point he got a cash pay-out from the government for his service and he decided that was his chance. He bought a flat bed truck and loaded it up with family members and neighbors and they set out for Oregon. My grandma didn't have many details to offer when I asked her about it except that they put a canvas awning over the back of the truck. In my mind it looks like a covered wagon, only with an engine, and I picture them laying under the stars and hoping desperately that the valleys of Oregon were as fertile as they had been led to believe and that better days were coming.
Our trip to Oregon will be quite different. We'll sleep in guest rooms and bed & breakfasts and have our music and AC in the car and I'm pretty sure will not be lacking for calories. At the other end is my childhood bedroom in my parent's house, not some great unknown. Still, I hope we have some adventures. And I wonder if some day our granddaughter will tell stories about the trip her grandparents made across the country in the early 10s, and it took all month and they had only their smartphone to guide them and do you know that in those days the batteries on those things only lasted for a few hours? Hard to imagine.
No comments:
Post a Comment