Apparently I've become one of those people everyone runs into on Facebook, who has fascinating, amazing vacations that everyone else envies. This was completely by accident, as I think of myself as quite ordinary. I am by any stretch of the imagination thoroughly middle-class, a professional in a single-income family with four kids and an income within 10% of the national average.
One of the things you, O gentle reader, shall learn in this blog is that one of my interests is geology. One of the fundamental principles of geology is that if it happened before, it can happen again. The same applies here. If I, under those circumstances, can cover half of the United States in a great circle repeatedly for years and very rarely see the same sights twice, then so can anyone else. As far as there is a secret, it is planning. At least initially, this planning process shall be the main subject of this blog. That's not to say the trips themselves will get left out, but the importance of foundations cannot be overstated.
First, though, a little about your author, Your Uncle, Traveling Matt. I am, as I said, a professional (a licensed civil engineer in the state of Texas), who works as a federal employee square in the middle of the Hill Country and square in the middle of the middle class. I grew up in Texas, spent some time in the military, and saw most of the continents of the world, including brief stints in Iraq and Japan, which, prior to the last few years, were most of my travel experiences. On the way I somehow acquired a wife and four children, ages spread between two (as of this writing) and ten. If I am going to be strictly honest here, and my advice won't mean much if I fudge it, the planning genius in the family is my wife. I am much better at improvising, though I can improvise like nobody's business.
That, then, is a brief background. In depth, there have been a series of long road trips, with first two, then four kids, all in a 2007 Honda Pilot that has logged something like fifty thousand miles in the three years we've had it. My wife doesn't know it, at least until she reads this, but I've named it after Robert E. Lee's most famous horse, Traveller, which, like the car, was a mid-sized gray. We started off fairly small, taking our first two kids driving on business travel. Whenever it was reasonable, I would stack training classes back-to-back, so that driving was preferred by the budgeting people to flying me out, flying me home, and flying me out again. We saw quite a bit of the south that way. Growing up, I had seen most of the Gulf Coast, still one of my favorite parts of the country, but north of the I-10/US-90 corridor was largely a mystery. We got to see the lower Mississippi valley in pretty good detail, ate a lot of very good meals, and saw a lot of the country that I hadn't seen before. Of course, in the process we also stayed in hotels, because we were just starting out. Those trips took us through Atlanta, Montgomery, Jackson, Vicksburg, down the Natchez Trace to Natchez, through New Orleans, San Antonio, Tupelo, Atlanta, and Bristol. We saw battleships and Civil War battlefields, plantations and historical roads, roadside attractions and riverside picnic areas, and, perhaps in a way that I never anticipated, something inside me woke up. I realized I enjoyed traveling, that I enjoyed seeing new things, and I never turned back.
After that, we started considering more "serious" travel. Our first "real" road trip was the following year, when, with my wife six months pregnant, we went on a relatively modest trip. That trip only covered two national seashores, two national wildlife refuges, two national monuments, one national forest, the most unique ferry ride I've ever been on, one speeding ticket, one projectile-vomiting child (while driving, naturally), a twenty-five-mile round-trip off-road adventure down the beach to see a lighthouse, made well worth it by the two Park Service volunteers manning it that day, and a series of great meals in unlikely places.
So that's how it all started. From there, it just kind of snowballed, and at this point, I have people walking up to me at work telling me how awesome my vacation looked, and telling me how there's no way they could do all of this. Well... there's honestly no reason you can't. You just have to be willing to accept difficulty and discomfort along the way (not welcome, just accept that they're going to be there and you won't be able to dodge them if you want to do these things), and plan ahead as best you can. However, one of the rules of life is just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. So why should you travel like this?
I could give you a wide variety of reasons, but the basic, most fundamental one as far as I'm concerned is that traveling broadens you. You see and do things that you don't get to see and do back home. Spending my entire life in Texas I wouldn't have gotten to point out to my children, for instance, how the successive levels of casemate at Fort Point in San Francisco taper, with thick, squat walls at the base thinning slightly as they rise up through four levels. I wouldn't have gotten to run through the drill of loading, sighting, and firing a cannon at Yorktown with my son. I wouldn't have been able to demonstrate to my children how the rocks at the Grand Canyon show how fast or slow the river was moving at any given time in its history, or see the condors there. To that end, lots of people get trapped in this thinking that if you have children, you don't travel, because children and travel just don't mix. I have twice now driven the western United States, minimum five thousand miles a trip, with four children. If you give them a chance, people will surprise you with their endurance and stamina, and children are no exception.
That's why I'm writing this, to show you what we did and how we did it. If you're reading this, hopefully it inspires you to get up, get out, and get moving. In the process I will probably use it to document my own private Bucket List, much of which I've accidentally crossed off or augmented in the last couple years. I will also hopefully drag in a guest blogger, since she's much better informed about the planning side than I am, and the boring parts, planning and reservations and mapping, are what make the exciting parts possible (insert comment about amateurs and tactics, and professionals and logistics). So... burrow into your seat, adjust it as best you can, buckle up, and turn the air conditioner up to get comfortable, we have miles to go before we sleep.
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