Road trip|Travel
My Post-Covid Adventure
It was time to get out
This morning, my husband turns to me and says something he hasn’t said for almost forever.
“I think we should go on an adventure today.”
Then he clarifies. Not the jump-out-of-a-plane kind of adventure some of our friends do from time to time (though he likes that kind, too). More the on-the-road Jack Kerouac type of stuff that I like.
Travel to almost anywhere is extremely near and dear to my heart, which made me fond of Kerouac at an early age. Having written some middle-grade books about an eleven-year-old girl from a Beat Generation family. I also love the idea of getting away just for the getting’s sake.
Since the pandemic, I have been at home much more than I ever wanted to be or thought I would be. Not so much because adventures don’t offer themselves, but because I have been shy of them, and way too anxious about the unknown — even if all the unknown means is exploring a town I’ve never been to.
I look out the window, thinking about how I always see May as a month of promises. Yes, I tell him, feeling a bit like Molly Bloom, whose monologue of multiple yesses in Ulysses is one of my favorites. We set out in his car, which has rattled constantly ever since we ran over a monumental pothole on the way to his family cabin last summer.
My husband is a trucker, and often comes home with tales of where he’s been. This week, he mentioned a couple of small towns he passed through, and we decide that’s where we need to go. We are hungry for towns with storefronts and coffee and ice cream shops; bookstores, novelty stores, and antique stores.
The towns we are looking for don’t have parking meters. Instead, you’ll find asphalt-paved lots where you won’t be towed or ticketed. You are free to park, and to walk, and to stop walking and look at the scenery.
In the car, I think about why I’ve cocooned myself for so long, and how I’m still cocooning for the most part during winter. By spring I am so hungry to see people I can barely stand it. After a bout of unexpected COVID in March, I don’t want to fall under this disease’s spell anymore. I want to enjoy my life.
I was surprised by this uninvited guest, thinking somehow that if it hadn’t arrived on my doorstep yet, it never would. I was hardly going anywhere except to the grocery store, had been vaccinated against the latest variant in late September and was even masking in most public venues. What may have happened is that my husband, who masks less, brought it home, with its pounding headaches and endless congestion.
We were lucky, because we had access to the anti-viral drug Paxlovid, which put our symptoms to rest during the first week. Yet, the symptoms returned a week or so later, and stayed with us in somewhat milder form for more than a month.
While recovering, I watched a show from the nineties called “Northern Exposure” on TV every night. I liked the characters, but most of what I liked wasn’t about them or even about the script — which is usually the biggest seller for me. What kept me watching was the way the entire community in the small Alaska town setting knew and cared about each other. It is about what we know we need and may be losing due to how fragmented most of our lives are now.
It is too easy to stay at home on the couch, watching TV characters make friends, fall in love, and have adventures. It’s easy to tell ourselves we don’t want to go downtown and wrestle with parking or pay the babysitter. It’s also easy to say we won’t take a drive to a small town in the middle of nowhere, because there’s too much work to do and not enough time to do it.
Today I put all that aside and am saying yes to something besides sitting home with my computer. Today I am giving myself more than an hour to walk around the neighborhood and more than a moment to look at eagles crossing the sky. I am giving myself permission to stop, listen, smell the new lilacs that greet me like old friends. I am saying it’s okay to stop the car and take pictures of them.
I’m giving these little gifts to myself because the past few years have been harder than I want to admit, and they’ve taken things from me that I took for granted. What they mostly took was joy and replaced it with anxiety.
I have spent more than enough time worrying about the well-known trifecta of health, money, and my career. I have refused to allow myself to rest, when in my own experience I know a writer’s best work comes from having the courage to be fallow.
Today my husband asked me to go on an adventure, and I am saying yes to it. We drive about an hour north of the city, with the sun winking at us the whole way. When we finally stop, I see why my husband chose this town. It’s surrounded by green everywhere, situated on the Mississippi River and structured from buildings created at least a century before we got here.
The park slopes down toward the river, inviting us to join it. There’s also a mural of people dressed in nineteenth century outfits, and the stores in the mural don’t look all that different from the ones we see now.
We walk around the streets aimlessly, which is our favorite kind of walking. We see the clothing stores, bookstores, and restaurants we imagined. I like how the restaurants seem like they aren’t trying to impress us — they’re just restaurants in a small town, not trying too hard to be cool with boutique designs and over-friendly wait staff. We also find a gas station with a kitschy looking triceratops and stop to get a photo of it.
All the while I am thinking about Kerouac’s journey through Americana, trying to remember what he said about the truckers who gave him rides. I seem to remember he liked them, and I’m going to stick with that recollection because I don’t have time to re-read the book now.
What I’m most grateful for at the moment is that my guy realized how much I needed to get out of the house today. The world held us back for a few years, and I am eager to rejoin it. The expression on my husband’s face tells me he feels the same way, too.
So here’s to a few more adventures, in small towns and cities, at lakes and oceans, theaters and movie houses, museums, restaurants, concerts and the homes of friends. I’m also up for traveling to states I haven’t seen yet and even other countries if we can make it there. Wherever I am, and wherever you are, it’s time for an adventure. I can’t sit them out anymore.
