things i learned on our road trip

Okay, I freely admit it - I am 36 years old and I had never been on a road trip before last weekend.  Seriously.  The longest car ride I'd ever been on was 4 hours to the northwoods of my own state.  I thought that felt like forever.  (Of course, I was in junior high at the time and everything was immensely annoying to me.)  This was an official road trip - 13 hours west with kid in tow.  (You might remember this post as we were trying to come up with ideas.)  From the southern corner of WI through the southern portion of MN all the way through SD ending up in the Rapid City and the Black Hills.  The kid got to see mountains, we did the whole National Park thing, and all we stopped at a major tourist trap.  What more could one ask for from a road trip?

Being our first major excursion, I learned a few things along the way and thought I'd pass them along for anyone who might want to do this themselves.

1) There's really nothing to look at between here and South Dakota. It's true. I had heard people talking about how there's nothing around, but I guess I thought "nothing" meant "not much." There are miles and miles of nothing. It's like driving through the desert, but instead of sand around you, it's grassland. Oh, and barely any animals around either. We saw a bald eagle fly over, a couple of pheasants walking along the roadway, lots of cattle in SD, and a few deer on the top of a hill, but for 13 hours of driving, it didn't give us much entertainment. Once we got to rivers, we had moments of scenery - the Mighty Mississippi and massive Missouri, but once we got past those, it was right back to nothing again.

Vast expanse of grass

2) Reminder: Different states have different speed limits. This is something that I had known but completely forgotten about. The hubster greatly enjoyed driving in South Dakota where the speed limit was 75 mph. Oh, and don't worry about police - we only saw 3 on the way there and 2 on the way back and most of those were in the home state. Drive on my friends!

3) No two states' rest stops are alike, and some of them are actually very nice.  I've never really been one for rest stops until this trip.  When I used to think of rest stops, I'd think of truckers getting lucky with truck stop floozys and men getting lucky with other men when given the "right" signal.  Now I understand the need for the rest stop and how flipping practical they are.  Park, stretch, pee, get your bearings.  It's a great thing!  I've been in Wisconsin rest stops a few times.  Pretty boring, vending machines, bathrooms with toilets that you're afraid to sit on... Minnesota's rest stops actually have attendants that sit in a little office and wave at you when you come in and even converse with you for a little while.  How nice is that?  South Dakota actually has very clean, very spacious and high tech rest stops.  High tech, you ask?  Yes - they have an internet kiosk in each one where you can look up the weather, driving conditions, traffic, and news all at the touch of a button.  For a state with not much else on the roads other than scary rural gas stations, the rest stops felt like mansions.

Rest Stop #1

4) The number of billboards on the road leading up to an attraction does not necessarily equate to the size or quality of that attraction.  For some reason, South Dakota doesn't seem to have a limit on the number of signs allowed along the roads.  I guess because there's so much open space, they feel the need to fill it up with hand-painted signs and billboards for attractions that are sometimes over 300 miles away.  For hours, we were seeing signs for an auto museum and when we finally passed the place on the freeway, we could see how tiny it was.  The same goes for an old reconstructed mining town and an exhibit of petrified plants, and a whole bunch of other little tourist traps along the way.  The number of signs that they had placed along the freeway could very easily fill those little attractions and I'm sure the price of admission is not small.


Ooh - how exciting!

4) Driving on tires that are almost bald in rainstorms with strong winds while thousands of semis are on the road is not advisable. Okay, maybe they weren't almost bald, but they were two points away from where we would be told it's time to get new ones. Or does that mean almost bald? Anyway, we had crappy stormy rainy weather all the way home and the combination of all of the conditions listed above and the added factor of driving at night did not make for a pleasant driving experience. By the time we finally made it home, my husband had to pry my fingers off of the steering wheel one by one because they were frozen there from the tension. This brings me to another thing I learned...

5) When your husband asks you if you want him to drive, it's not because he's being nice and trying to relieve you of your stress, it's because he thinks he can do better or it would make him feel more comfortable. Now, had I known this at the time, I would have welcomed the chance to take my hands off of that steering wheel. Why he couldn't have just said, "Okay, it's my turn," or, "I think I'd feel more comfortable driving now," is beyond me. Too many years of being told he's supposed to be sensitive about the way he brings things up to a woman I guess. When he asked me if I wanted him to drive, it was usually after he had woken up from a nap...groggy driving does not make me very comfortable. I thought it was just because he could tell I was stressed out and I wasn't going to wimp out like that...no, sir! But if I had known it was for his sake and not mine, I would have gladly switched. You see, after almost 15 years of marriage, we're still learning things!

6) And I believe this is the most important one... A road trip isn't all about your destination - it's also about enjoying your time together on the way.  That's something we should all remember about life in general.