Gentle curves and the negotiated playlist

Musings from the two-lane road trip

There’s something about a road trip, amirite? I’ve spent long segments of my lifetime roadtripping, whether across the country and back with my mom as a kid or to Maine for an aunt-and-uncle visit with a college friend. You get your road snacks, your playlist – back in the day it was always a cassette tape carefully curated and planned to not end a side mid-song.¹ Maps, lodging reservations, discussions of side trips or hikes or pull-offs, to keep things interesting. Road trips with friends, road trips with your parents, road trips by yourself, road trips with a honey. All have a different flavor and inhabit a different memory bank. 

I am sure my love of a road trip originates in the back roads of Virginia, rolling around like a bowling ball in the back seat while my parents rally-raced our orange Honda CVCC through graveled intersections and checkpoints. I brought my kids up on long drives too, where they were ensconced in the back seat in blankets, books, and yes, sometimes movies. They’ve seen a lot, from the endless cross-state basketball tournaments, to Bellingham Washington to catch a ferry north to Ketchikan. At every opportunity, a two-lane side trip was a requirement.

This here is a cable ferry. Kids and I took a whole Montana History Tour one summer and side-tripped from the Fort Benton road to experience this throwback. Carter, MT 2011

My parents just took an epic road trip through the southeast. They are 79 and 84 so this was a pretty substantial commitment. I ungracefully called it their farewell tour, but for real, who in their 80s spends 12 days on the road? What ensued: A lot of visiting, a lot of “what kind of coke do you want? I’ve got coke, sprite, and diet?”² A lot of kudzu and small white roadside churches baking in the slow heat of a summer day. 

Setting ground rules is a key part of the road trip experience, especially if you’re embarking with an unknown partner. Do you stop for breakfast? What’s the expectation about passing large trucks on two-lane roads? Is there an agreed-upon music selection or do you try to find a podcast you both enjoy, or is silence the best background noise? A work colleague and I took a trip to Havre last fall – that’s nine hours RT, so we went with a podcast recommended by a third colleague. This podcast, called Dr. Death, described in detail many examples of a doctor whose deliberate incompetence led to people’s lifelong disfigurements and even deaths, and it was…very hard to listen to. Even funnier to try with a colleague when we’re both cringing and also discussing the impossible-to-believe nature of what happened. But that’s what you do while you’re cruising along the high prairie for the fifth hour.

Hour-long construction delay near Jackson, MT, coming from a girls’ trip to the hot springs. We made friends with other drivers. I napped. 2019

Last spring I drove myself out to the Oregon coast, in itself a delightful road trip I took over two days. I stayed the night in a tiny house which I thought was in Hood River, OR, but was actually back across a terrifyingly narrow, slippery metal bridge barely skimming the broad and seething Columbia River, in Washington. The drive itself comprises so much of the joy I feel in going anyplace: driving new roads, seeking out ways through the trees, the surprise of a creek or a hillside in bloom. Avoiding bridges.

And this week a college friend and I roadtripped from Missoula to Crested Butte, CO, where she lives. We navigated the whole trip on two-lane roads rather than interstates, crossed innumerable mountain passes, lost track of the state line boundaries. Out of a chex mix bag, she eats the chex and I eat the bagel chips. Her music taste pulls in songs from our college days but we talked over it the whole time. Mostly me, mostly I talked. She said she didn’t mind. 

Up Kebler Pass to Crested Butte. “Two-lane” is a stretch. June 2023

When the interstate system was built, it made for some faster driving. Safer? Maybe in some cases. Less interesting? Definitely. Give me the chicken fried steak in a small-town cafe and higher gas prices over a Cracker Barrel at a major interchange any day.

1. friends have made fun of me for this before. Feel free to also do so, in your head.

2. IYKYK