I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
This week Ray and I are headed on a 2600-mile road trip from Highlands Ranch, Colorado to New Orleans, Louisiana across four days and as many states. That means an average of about ten hours each day, not exactly easy! The winter weather here in Colorado has been so mild that we started thinking about taking one, and when a need and opportunity arose, we raised our hands. I don’t think either of us were counting on such an ambitious one though.
I’ve grabbed three audiobooks from the library (two thrillers and one relationship book), started following a few new podcasts (fiction, politics, storytelling), and got the idea from Gemini to read aloud information from Wikipedia about small towns and other points of interest as we pass them. I’m sure we’ll also listen to music, sit in companionable silence, and have great conversation at times. When I’m not sleeping! Haha.
The route takes us over Ratón Pass, a mountain byway I’ve never crossed. Located at the Colorado-New Mexico border, it sits between Trinidad, Colorado and Raton, New Mexico. At 7,834 feet elevation it doesn’t sound too high to me. The Loveland Pass summit, on the way to A Basin and Keystone, for example, looms at 11,990 feet.
My sister drove here with her two children for Christmas and found that her hybrid CRV had a hard time making it up the pass. The road up and down the pass reaches a 6% grade — along with the almost 8,000 feet in elevation this is apparently a difficult climb for the CRV’s 2.0L hybrid engine. I’m pretty sure Ray’s truck has a turbo engine (internal combustion) which will provide much better power at altitude for us.
Gemini suggested we shouldn’t rely on the Tacoma’s adaptive cruise control on the steep drive down the pass, because it prioritizes comfort and precise speed over brake safety. If it needs to, the ACC will “ride the brakes” to keep the truck going as close to whatever the speed setting is. Instead, Gemini suggests we use “S” mode — sequential shift mode on the gear shifter — and shift down to 4th or 5th gear.
Now I know nothing about this other than what Gemini has told me, and it could be hallucinating. Anyway I trust Ray with his years of experience as a heavy equipment operator and fixing and maintaining engines of all kinds to make good decisions about it. It’s nice to be taking a road trip with a mechanical genius.
Why do I love road trips so much? This is my third big one in the last six months. Any time someone says they’re doing a road trip and looking for a companion, I’m in. In August, I accompanied my older daughter on the first portion of her cross-country trek from Mountain View, California to Atlanta, Georgia. Right before Thanksgiving, I flew to Asheville, North Carolina to join one of my best friends as she brought her life including two cats to Colorado to spend the holiday season with her father who has an advanced cancer diagnosis. And then back in September, Ray and I took a day trip through Park, Lake, Pitkin, and Summit Counties, hoping to see some fall color but mostly just enjoying our time together and getting out of the city into the mountains that we both so love.
Unlike plane trips, where you are teleported from one city to another, with road trips you build a mental map of highways and states and towns and landmarks. It’s the best way to fully accept that Kansas City isn’t in Kansas, it’s in Missouri, and it’s a beautiful thriving city with some of the best barbecue in the U.S. If you only ever head west on I-70 to Summit County or south on 285 to Fairplay, Salida, and beyond, without crossing Hoosier Pass from Fairplay to Breck, you’ll never know how these mountain towns and counties link up to one another. I didn’t until I was more than 50 years old, despite growing up in Colorado and taking many ski trips during my childhood here.
Unlike on plane trips, on a road trip you take some security and comfort along with you. You have space for a lot more stuff. We’ll take a large dog crate and bins of dog food with us. We’ll have a bed for Kristy to sleep on. We’ll have a cooler full of snacks plus carry along a picnic-style New Year’s Eve dinner to eat overlooking Sikes Lake in Wichita Falls. Think brie drizzled with honey and warmed in the hotel room microwave, served on gluten-free crackers, with thin slices of proscuitto, Marcona almonds, and a bottle of prosecco to toast the new year.
My old 2003 Honda Odyssey minivan was the perfect road trip vehicle for comfort. I could fit all three of my kids and their luggage plus snowboards with dogs in the back on dog beds: one time to Las Vegas, other times to mountain towns for ski trips, and once to Champaign-Urbana during Covid to get my daughter’s apartment contents when U of I went all remote her junior year. That time it was just Arden and me and the plains of I-70 east: one of the finest and most memorable experiences of my life.
The “humanistic geographer” Yi-Fu Tuan made a distinction between space and place in his work. He said “place is security, space is freedom.” Place is a pause — home, safety, the known, the armchair, the established career. Space is movement — the horizon, the unknown, the abstract potential. It is where we feel free. But space can make us feel lost or vulnerable if we stay too long while place can make us feel stagnant. You need both, and road trips provide them.
A road trip offers pure space even as the car we drive through it serves as a mobile place. As we drive, the world whizzes by, full of potential. The car, the people and dog in it, the on-the-go snacks, the podcasts and audiobooks will ground us in our moving place. Road trips bring freedom via space combined with the comfort and intimacy of place.
By reading Wikipedia entries aloud as we go we experience placemaking. Locations are transformed from space into place. It feels like the Truman Show in a way, that the locations only appear as I reach them and learn about them, only to disappear when I’m gone. But they still live on in my memory once I’ve been there, expanding the horizons of my self.
Even before we start to drive, I am learning about new places and making them mine. Ratón Pass connecting the towns of Trinidad, Colorado and Raton, New Mexico (curiously that town has no accent in the name) is already becoming not just an unnamed unknown pass to drive over but now a place my sister and I know. My sister and her kids will remember it as the pass her new hybrid Honda CRV could barely handle, the pass where my sister’s daughter experienced driving a car up a 6% climb for the first time. How will I know it when we reach it around 7:30 am on Wednesday morning, if we leave as planned from Highlands Ranch at 4 am? The sun will be rising, the road may be slick, if the snow from today hasn’t all melted yet.
On the mini road trip Ray and I took through Park and Summit Counties in September, we drove through Twin Lakes. That’s actually Lake County, Colorado I’ve just learned. From Twin Lakes, we crossed Independence Pass to Aspen.
Even though I went to Aspen once on a family ski trip as a child, it has felt impossibly far to me ever since, almost like it doesn’t exist. Our September road trip was a way of bringing it closer, bringing it into my experience, which made my mental landscape larger than it had been. With a road trip the world gets smaller while your mind expands.
On a road trip things can go wrong, which is just to say it is just like regular life. My sister just reported to me that the windshield wiper fluid she filled her car up with in Louisiana before her trip froze while driving out of Colorado on I-70 headed back home (skipping Ratón Pass and driving through Kansas then Oklahoma instead). Apparently there are different kinds of wiper fluid in different places! Fortunately some fellow drivers showed her how to turn a sports water bottle into a makeshift spray bottle filled with winter-grade fluid so she could clear her windshield.
Now, through their road trip, my sister’s kids have learned two new things: (1) hybrids have trouble with climbs at elevation (though the loud noise they make in this situation isn’t apparently an actual problem, just distressing) and (2) you need different wiper fluid for Colorado winter vs all-year-round Louisiana conditions. That’s something you wouldn’t get from a plane trip, though you could learn other things.
A road trip can be the most reckless of travels, or maybe the most reckless kind of travel I’m willing to do. With a road trip you don’t have to decide exactly what day to leave. You don’t have to reserve hotel rooms in advance, and maybe it’s better not to, so that you can maintain flexibility to drive shorter or further than planned on a day just due to how you feel and what conditions you face. A road trip is a way to be a reckless explorer of space without losing the comforting placeness of intimacy.
I’m excited for this week’s plans though I know it will be grueling at times. I’m lucky to have a partner who is just as enthusiastic about taking this opportunity as I am.