Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. When I chose the word ADVENTURE for my 2019 theme, this road trip was already in the works. Last year, I attended the Bright Line Eating Annual Family Reunion in San Diego all by myself. It was my first vacation alone, and while I loved spending time with my Bright Lifer roommate, it felt like a waste to pay for a nice room at a resort with all these amenities and not get to use them. I got the crazy idea in my head that my family could come with me and enjoy the resort. Naturally, we thought it would be too costly to pay for four plane tickets, so soon we plotted a 16 day road trip that definitely cost more than four seats on a plane but supplied us with countless memories and “firsts” in exchange. The timing was perfect, because my oldest just graduated from college. This might be our last chance to take a trip like this. Here is a recap of our epic adventure along with some lessons learned.
The best laid plans of mice and moms
I am a planner. I like to make plans, and I am good at time management. This means I know just how to have a freaking productive vacation! I also strive to be a life-long-learner, so I have taken lessons from previous vacations, and I know that my family does not always appreciate my scheduling zeal. We were also dragging along an extremely introverted teen, plus I had to consider that despite my love of road trips I have issues with my spine that make it difficult to sit for long periods. The solution? Schedule down-time! In the midst of all of the things we want to do and see, there have to be breaks. I also had to strategically plan so that we had a few different hotel “home bases” instead of being in a different room every day. Being able to leave someone in a hotel room to rest while others go do something is key. We stayed in 8 different hotels on our trip. We spent more time at the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and our true destination, San Diego. The more activity involved, the longer we needed to stay. We also front-loaded the trip with activity. Driving days were longer on the way home. We stopped for gas and food. We enjoyed the countryside but didn’t plan any activities.
A new lesson I learned on this trip is that you can’t drive across the desert in July without having car trouble and that if my husband wants to bring his jumper cables in addition to Holly’s (too short) ones, go ahead and let him – even if you are already playing suitcase Tetris and can’t squeeze another thing into the car. It’s also a good idea to have a least one cell phone that is on a different carrier so it has a signal when none of your other phones do. (Thanks work phone!) And you can usually find someone to help you if you are at a crowded tourist stop.
Also, be flexible, because you might not get to go to the Hoover Dam, even if you just made your family listen to 90 minutes of podcasts about the history. You can suggest driving back out there later from Vegas, but you might not get anyone to go with you once they are in “down-time” mode. Especially if everyone else on the trip is an adult, you have to give them a vote, and this won’t always mean sticking to the plan. Take it as an excuse to come back later.
Survival Tips
How do you spend 16 days in a car or hotel room with your family and not kill each other? First of all, it helps if you get along pretty well in the first place. I’m just going to throw that out there. Don’t sign up for a trip like this with people that you can’t stand. Also, it helps to have kids that are grown and don’t need constant supervision. This allows me to get up early and go to breakfast by myself or take whichever family member happens to be up early that day. Planning activities that allow people to go their separate ways is a good idea too. One of our stops was Meow Wolf in Santa Fe. This is something we did together but the kids went one way and we went another. Find things to enjoy together but apart. Be sure you are in safe places where it’s okay to go for a meal or to the pool without the rest of your crew.
I also find it helpful to keep reminding your family that they are having fun. Point out how cool it is to see both the largest and second largest canyons in the country on the same trip. It helps if you have a good attitude and tell them how much you are enjoying yourself and how special this trip is to you. To help ingrain the activities in your family’s memories start saying “Hey, remember the time we __” as soon as possible after you have done the thing. If they retort with “Remember the time we had car trouble and nearly died?” be ready to reply with “At least that’s when it decided to rain in the desert! How cool was that?!”
Also, sometimes it helps if people bring headphones so they can ignore you.
Books! Audiobooks!
It wouldn’t be a Given Context blog if we didn’t talk about books. And it wouldn’t be an epic road trip without a good audiobook, or two. When your trip is over 50 hours of driving, you might plan to listen to some of your best driving music. We didn’t listen to any music. None. We started our trip with an audiobook I had on loan from the library’s app. Our first day of driving was going to be about 8 hours and this book was perfectly timed to wrap up shortly before our arrival. This was a favorite of mine, and having my family captive and the excuse of a library due date gave me a chance to force them to listen. Of course, they loved it. The book was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which I previously raved about. If you STILL haven’t read this, do it now. You can thank me later. I highly recommend the audiobook format.
For the next several legs of our journey we listened to Becoming by Michelle Obama. I had picked this one up with an Audible credit to save for this road trip. This is a long one. Even on 1.25x speed it took the rest of our trip to California and part of the way home. Granted, we did break for true crime podcasts a few times. Everyone in the car enjoyed this one, too. There were a few dips in attention span, but overall we agreed this was an interesting perspective on life in the White House and how someone ends up there. The epilogue was my favorite part. I hope we continue to hear a lot from Michelle in the future.
Thanks to cell phones, I was able to stay in touch with my book club, and I started reading Throne of Glass while I was in San Diego. We have different themes for book club and the upcoming theme is to read a book that someone else picked for you. This was picked for me by a wonderful person and I downloaded to my phone’s kindle app and started it immediately… but I was on vacation, so I didn’t get very far. I have been home from vacation for almost two weeks and I am still working on this one. I wanted to give myself credit for attempting to actually read and not just listen, so this one makes the post. My blog, my rules. More on this one after I finish it.
Lastly, we decided to pick another audiobook to see us through, and our chauffeur asked for something scary. When you say scary, I think Stephen King, so we opted for The Shining. No one in the car had read it. Is it a coincidence that we chose a book about someone going nuts being cooped up with their family at this point in our journey? The kicker about this one was… when we made it home we were two hours from the end of the book! After 16 days with each other, I could not convince anyone that it was a good idea to keep driving around until we finished. This means I listened to the last two hours later when I was all alone. Scary indeed!
We covered a lot of ground
You can take that headline literally and figuratively. We put a lot of miles on the Subooboo and we saw a lot of cool stuff. We went places we had never been before and some we may never go to again. We ran the gamut from art to adventure and even some adventurous art. We absorbed the southwest scenery as well as the subjects of our books. We learned something about ourselves, some history, and the dangers of cabin fever. I think we all had fun, and we made some memories. You can see more of our memories on Instagram here.