"IF....Roadtripping with Grandpa 2018 Version

“If...you give a moose a muffin…..”

“If...you give a mouse a cookie….”

“If ...you give a dog a donut…….”

“If...you give a cat a cupcake….”

To these popular and well loved titles by author Laura Numeroff, I would suggest an addendum, lacking perhaps in alliteration, but leading to an equally logical chain of incremental links:

“If ….you give a boy a Road Atlas…”  

Especially if that boy is Levi....

If you give a boy a Road Atlas, he will tell you the next exit.  And the exit after that. He will ask you if you’re in Kansas...and a little while later, he will ask you if you’re still in Kansas…

But...he’s just checking on YOUR navigation, because if you give a boy a Road Atlas, he will know how to read the map.  He will keep you on your toes, inventing new and intricate routes to your destination, particularly if these routes include cities or states he’d really like to drive through.  It can be difficult to stay excited about I -70 across Kansas to Denver….

“If...you give a boy a menu, he’ll order a cheeseburger..”

If you give a boy a cheeseburger, he’ll ask if there’s barbeque sauce.

Especially if that boy is Josh....

This makes meals with Josh both the easiest of times and the hardest of times.  Steak houses, burger joints, even Mexican places can be relied upon to have something satisfactory on the menu.  Given his preferences, credit Josh with a generosity of culinary adventurism the evening a sudden Vail thunderstorm drove us into the only place that would seat a grandpa, a grandma, and six kids….a German restaurant with an empty second floor.

“If...you add kids to water, pretty soon you have ….fun.”

Kids in ankle-high water moccasins wading through the busy brown water of the Colorado;

kids bumping over the waves in an inner tube.  

Kids tippy toeing over the rocks across a mountain stream;

kids skipping stones and heaving sticks;

kids building towers in the middle of the creek;

kids washing pebbles and putting the prettiest ones in their pockets to carry home….Kids, rub a dub dub, half a dozen of them,  escaping the mountain chill in the hot tub.

 “If…. someone asks what a belly flop looks like…..? ”

Trust me, Josh is your guy.  Not only that, but the ensuing splat will be a 10 point 0 on the Richter scale.  

“If you give a kid some money, he’ll need a souvenir….or a snack!”  Refrigerator magnets are a family tradition; Levi is captivated by Abbie’s Colorado Flag magnet so we make a trip to the gift car on the Leadville & Colorado Southern excursion train.

Because breakfast that morning was early, Gabe and Aaron need a root beer….Gabe is on a growth spurt and has spent most of the trip hungry. This is why we have a snack bag at all times....

Josh, despite remonstrances from his older brother, buys a pocket knife on the train.  This is a grandparent sponsored trip and Josh has his own money, so the likelihood that this pocket knife will follow past souvenir pocket knives into the kingdom of lost tools is irrelevant.  (At last report, the train pocket knife was not yet lost, even though the recent move from rental to new house may have altered that status: in this case, entirely understandable!)

 

Aaron broke even on the trip: one College World Series hat became someone else’s souvenir in Eagle, Colorado. It is replaced by one carefully considered cap purchased in Vail.

 

Not thirty seconds after the conductor on the train cautioned everyone to hold tight to their ticket, Lizzie, leaning out the window to take a picture (with, thankfully, her camera on a lanyard!) watched her ticket flutter away under the train’s wheels.  She turned to me, aghast, crying out, ‘I’ve lost my ticket!’ Of course she did! Fortunately, our receipt proved she was accounted for...though this particular blond headed conductor did not look the sort to leave a little girl beside the tracks, 142 miles from Denver…..

The grandparents did their part:  six kids got into the rental van in Kansas City, and six kids got back out four days later.  During those four days, no one got hurt (really), no one got sick, (well, just a little), no one fought or argued (except when they were really really tired).  The cousins were considerate and kind to each other even during the long drive there and back. They helped their grandparents, and they helped each other. I’ll never forget that.  

Nor will I forget drying towels at all hours, the blessed luxury of a washer and dryer for six kids and two adults, Blake bringing back frozen pizzas the night we arrived and how we attacked them like they were gourmet, not just DiGiorno.  No, no one wanted to sleep with Josh...or Gabe...or even Levi, (snoring? kicking?) but it all worked out with the bonus of a bedtime story or two and the chance for this grandma to “tuck in” all her kids…

There was no time to read, no time to use our phones...except to take pictures to send home! Time was the present and that was busy enough....

For a week afterwards, I woke up feeling I should count noses….

And “If"….I could do it all again, I would!

Around the World

“What is the farthest you have ever traveled?”

Many Christmases ago, Santa Claus left me a light-up Oreo yo-yo in my stocking.  Unlike the cheap Duncan yoyos we were used to, the extra ballast of the batteries inside made the Oreo yoyo stable enough to perform simple tricks like 'walk the dog' and not turn into a twisting snarled confusion

But even the amazing light up yo-yo couldn’t make it “around the world”.

And neither have I. Certified road warriors that we are, our travels have tallied thousands upon thousands of miles on highways both blue and red, multi lane thoroughfares and the kind of two lanes that dwindle down until they truly become “lost highways”....because you’re truly lost. When I was a kid, I-80 was a four lane gravel road through the empty middle of Wyoming. Some of our family vacations took us so far down the “scenic” routes that the navigator (me) found herself fixated on the gas gauge, not the landscape. At least one I-70 entanglement was untied by exiting onto a cliff hanging byway that was definitely a road less traveled over the Rockies, even in our 4wd Dodge Ram. Rental cars have borne the brunt of the inappropriate match between road and vehicle: we were grateful when the 25’ Lincoln assigned to us in Reno (we looked like high rollers?) plowed through the snow in the Sierras without stranding us in the chain zone.  And we crossed our fingers when the Buick we drove in Glacier didn’t high center on a boulder when we took a different...and less maintained Forest Service road...back to civilization one evening after dark.

Being lost in the dark is one kind of thrill...not the best kind.  It doesn’t hold a candle to waking during an overnight flight to Europe to look down and see boundless snow and ice and realize you are high above the top of the world, a place you’ve never seen before and will never set foot on.  The same feeling of insignificance attaches as you spend sleepless  hours over the miles of ocean waves between the US mainland and Hawaii watching the little jet creep across the arc of the map on the monitor….Whether the end of your flight is Oahu (4800 miles from Tarkio) or Dublin(3400 miles), the green islands rising from the ocean are a welcome sight.

Cruising is both stranger and more familiar. Without the reference points of shore, a day at sea sends me scurrying to the big map to find our place in the world. On the other hand, your ship is your world and a routine of leisure, no more, no less, is what’s available.

Ah, but embark in a foreign land from either airship or cruise ship and the real adventure of travel unfolds.  Because it is not just distance from home that makes a trip travel, it is the distance in time.  Living in a small town, working on the prairie, where man’s works are constantly under siege by wind, by dust, by the seesaw whiplash of heat and cold and the continental climate, a person lives in recognition of how tenuous are our works upon the earth.

In Ireland, though, our very first stop was the Newgrange Passage Tomb, a man made mound surrounded by white quartz rocks with a passageway constructed especially to catch the rays of the rising sun on the winter solstice. This immense undertaking was constructed by ancient man 3500 years ago. When we traveled to Europe, I felt the awe I have for Mt. Rainier or Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon: a feeling for the immensity of time, like the bulk of an iceberg, except that weight is human history.  Excavations in Greece, cathedrals in Italy, relics in Ireland, all left by unnamed human hands like mine.

Technology has made it easier...indeed, even possible, for an ordinary person to travel untold miles in space and visit wonders unimaginable. But we have not yet mastered the chasm of time; even the most learned of men must play a guessing game with the clues those before us left behind. Our little trips span more than 10,000 miles point to point...and don't we hope to add to that tally! But even if we do, it will leave less than a scuff on the surface of time's story.....