Kings of the Road
The fathers who made me a traveler
I’ve never not traveled. Raised by parents who passed their wanderlust on to me, my childhood was filled with everything from weekend camping trips at nearby Truman Lake and the Lake of the Ozarks to a couple of pre-Epcot Orlando visits with the big mouse, or treks with the extended family or one of my friends into the Rocky Mountains.
Even though it’s Father’s Day and this is about my dad and Grandpa Chuck, I do need to acknowledge that I’m pretty sure these trips happened with a lot of planning and work from my mom and Granny Viv. And really, I’m pretty sure the wanderlust gene comes from my Sagittarius mother who got it from her trucker father. However it happened, I come from a family of travelers, with a dad and grandpa who set the pace and also taught me how to travel in a way that suits me.
For starters: the camping. So much camping. I was never a fan and haven’t camped since I was 24. I have 17 different pollen and mold allergies. One of them causes me to break out in hives when I touch grass. Why in the world would I want to sleep outside when it’s trying to kill me?
Not that this impacted my family’s choice of lodging. I know camping was the best financial choice. And everyone else seemed to love it, but I never did. As I got older that made for some very tense vacations. At least we weren’t tent campers. Grandpa Chuck always had a fifth-wheel RV, while my parents opted for the smaller pop-up camper.
The earliest trip I remember very fuzzily was the only extended trip I’ve ever made to Texas. Mostly I remember a magical underwater mermaid act, and just being with my parents and grandparents.
With Grandpa being an over-the-road truck driver, he plotted our trips in a road atlas, highlighting highways with less traffic and marking the best places to eat and sleep, what to avoid, and how to find all the stuff that might not be in the AAA books. At one point this included stops at the pre-franchise Cracker Barrel in Tennessee on the way to Florida, where I was thrilled to find bologna and cheese on crackers on the menu. Hillbilly charcuterie.
There was a Valentine’s Week trip to Colorado a year after the Texas trip when my parents took their car and I rode in the way-back of my grandparent’s VW station wagon. They didn’t complain when I banged on my toy piano way back there, and I didn’t die in a rear-end collision, so it was a pretty good trip.
Also, there were motel rooms on that trip.
While Grandpa was the planner, my dad was the big kid who encouraged adventure and daring. This is the guy who got my mom’s attention with his drag-racing GTO, after all.
Our trips were opportunities for me to learn some independence, especially since it wasn’t unusual for us to make the 740-mile drive to or from home to Estes Park, Colorado in one day (put that on my list of travel don’ts). I learned to entertain myself in the backseat with books, notebooks, and music. But one trip in particular made me feel independent in a way that only a Gen X kid can.
When I was eight my parents and I made our second Florida trip. My dad outfitted the bed of his truck with a camper shell and a pallet for a bed. With a sliding glass window that opened to the cab for easy communication, I felt like I had my own apartment as we cut through the South to Orlando. I slept in it most nights of the trip but was pretty scared the night Ronald Regan was shot. I still had a lot to learn.
A few years later when the three of us were in Colorado, I was sleeping in the back of our full-size Ford Bronco and wrenched my back in a way that no 11-year-old should experience. That was when we found out what muscle relaxers do to a squirrely kid.
That same trip, my dad decided it was time for some horseback riding lessons for my mom and me. He’s always been an expert rider, so we rented three horses and went out without a guide. While my horse was docile and slow—”Give ‘er a kick in the ribs!” was not an instruction I intended to follow—my mom’s horse was, let’s say “spirited,” going into a full buck when it saw a snake on the trail.
“Don’t worry! She’s just pitchin’ a little!”
When we weren’t driving to Colorado or Florida, we were spending time in the campers at the lake, which became more fun when I realized I could float in an intertube tethered to the boat and read a book while everyone else fished. But it was worth going for the time at the campsite, sitting around the fire and listening to the adults shooting the shit. We weren’t a musical family but there was one occasion when a cousin and I wanted songs to sing around the fire. Somehow, “The Battle of New Orleans” came up, and my dad got excited because he knew the words.
Since teasing each other until the subject develops a psychological disorder is my family’s love language, this would be the first and only time my dad sang in front of me. He was thoroughly roasted along with several bags of marshmallows and a lot of weenies.
There were plenty of trips without me, too, which taught me to be independent, and in hindsight informed me that parents need to have lives that sometimes don’t include their kids. Especially when said kid isn’t interested. I’d get shuffled off to Chuck and Viv’s or, if they were traveling with my parents, aunts and uncles let me crash with them.
But there were plenty of trips where my wants were first and foremost. Like the trip to Alabama in 1986 when I was 13. For two years—an eternity at that age—I’d been pen pals with a girl in Florence, Alabama. Tori and I met through the pen pal classifieds in the back of some teen fan magazine and bonded over a shared love of music. In a move that surprises me to this day, we drove to Florence, with a camping night in Memphis before my parents dropped me off at Tori’s house were I spent a few days before her parents let her ride back to Missouri with us.
There was also a trip to Colorado with my friend Stephanie the summer prior in that tiny pop-up camper. Being an only child, this was a new world to me, feeling like I had a sister for a week.
Through the 1990s, after I flew the coop, my family continued traveling. My parents, grandparents, aunts, and an uncle made annual trips to the Rockies.
I joined one last time, in 1997. At 24, I’d made a couple of solo road trips by then, and a couple of flights. I was quickly figuring out my own traveling style which was a lot different from the style I grew up with. I like solitary travel. Leisurely travel, where I can sleep and sit someplace pretty with a book or notebook whenever the mood strikes. Talking to strangers instead of further bonding into my own clan.
While those childhood, and specifically adolescent, trips could get rocky, I’m forever grateful for the men who taught me that there’s more to the world than what I can see from my house.
My dad still travels, although he and my mom haven’t gone anywhere since last autumn, thanks to moving to a new house and dealing with some health issues. I know he’s got to be getting stir-crazy. By this time of year, he, my mom, and their cattle dog Maggie have usually at least gone to Texas to see the bluebonnets in bloom. While he’s been forced into cautiousness now, his full-blast sense of fearless adventure still lives in me. Mine isn’t expressed by driving ATVs through the mountains like his. For me, it comes out in my lack of hesitation when it comes to going into the dive bar, talking to the people who talk to me, and lighting out for a new place just to see something different.
Grandpa Chuck was telling his trucking stories and asking me about my trips until the last time I saw him on his 97th birthday. He always filled my imagination with his tales about the places he went behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler. I definitely come by my love of telling travel stories from him. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he passed a week and three days after the last day I saw him. I was in New Orleans, where the veil is thin between this world and the next. He went in the early Sunday morning hours the day after my 50th birthday. I didn’t sleep that night, feeling the weight of his presence before I got the 7 a.m. text telling me he was gone.
For a year after his death, I wore a pendant I found in Granny Viv’s things after she died in 2018. My friend Holly has serious jewelry-making skills, turned the pendant into a necklace for me. It’s a cheap, soft metal little trinket in the shape of a steering wheel with the words “Back Home Driver.” He didn’t remember where he got it or why, so I gave it my own meaning: We are a family of travelers, but we always come home.
Happy Father’s Day, Pete and Chuck. Thanks for the trips.