Trip-Tik

Once upon a time, long, long ago, I joined AAA. We were on our honeymoon, and because JC did not have a great deal of leave time, we had gotten married just before the annual Navy JAG Conference here in DC, so that we could have an extra week or so. Of course, JC had to attend some of the meetings, so I ran errands while he was otherwise engaged--returning a few wedding gifts, writing 'thank you's--and joining AAA, preparatory to our long drive cross-country. (JC was at that time stationed in Oceanside, CA.) I got maps (GPS not having been invented yet, much less the cell phones and laptops and other devices we now rely upon..) And I got Trip-Tiks. Personalized maps and guidance across the entire country, pointing out the locations of hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and places of interest along the way. I wish I'd saved them.

We were very young, and though JC had made this trip before, it was my first cross-country adventure. I'd never traveled too far from home before, and certainly never beyond the Mississippi. The Trip-Tik reduced the magnitude of the trip to small bites, which made the concept far more digestible. And nibble by nibble, bite by bite, we ate up the distance between here and there--"there" being San Diego.

Today I found myself again at the AAA office, asking for another trip to be sliced and diced into manageable chunks. We are driving to Rhode Island to deliver a car to our daughter and her young family. There have been a lot of trips in between, lots of water under lots of bridges, some with little girls sprawled in the "wayback" of a station wagon, some replete with "Are we there yet?"s and "I'm hungry"s. I remember trips where each child got a roll of quarters at the beginning of the trip, and had to give them up, one by one, for various acts of mommy-prohibited behavior. What was left at our destination was souvenir money, to do with as they pleased. There have been happy trips and sad trips, funerals and graduations, weddings and vacations...How much time have we spent in the car over the years? More than we should have, I'll warrant. And yet, those rides are where we made decisions, discussed problems, figured out answers. It was where we listened to books on tape, told stories, sang songs, played games, and did a lot of talking. It was there that we discovered ourselves and each other.

There's no map for all the territory we've covered in the car, no Trip-Tik that delivers us safely to our destination. But there's comfort in the Trip-Tik lesson: no matter how long the trip, no matter how arduous, or how many construction delays or traffic jams we encounter, we get where we want to go, bit by bit, mile by mile, by taking each journey a page at a time, managing each piece and moving forward, ever forward.