this is not the road trip post

According to Wikipedia, Bertha Benz was the first person to take a long distance road trip (106 km at a maximum speed of 16 km/hour). She made the trip in 1888 with her two sons and “without the permission of her husband”. Her reason was that she wanted to visit her mother although there are suggestions she actually did it to publicize her hubby’s brand new ‘Benz’ motor car. It worked.

A third reason (unofficial but most probable in my opinion):

road trips are jolly good fun

What I realized after a recent 3400+ km drive to PEI and back is that a road trip (different from getting somewhere as quickly as possible) taps into a sense of timelessness—the proverbial ‘journey’ versus ‘destination’.

There is still red sand in the car and in my shoes and I am in love with a rock I brought back and I keep playing the tape I kept playing all the way across New Brunswick and then Quebec and Ontario, right up into my driveway.

Laura Smith, it was. Not much of her music available online but if you like this, you will love her.

Something I learned: a good tape is an essential thing for a road trip. Just one. It becomes the soundtrack. (Would love to know your own road trip soundtrack if you’d care to share.)

Other tidbits of road trip lore and Things I Learned In Between the Fine Lines… to come. (And, I hope, to hear, from you…)

2 thoughts on “this is not the road trip post”

When we do our 900 k trek to the Gaspe, we listen to the music of our youth–which in his case means rock and in mine Dylan–so it’s a trip backward into memory, as well as into the landscape. Though there are memories in the landscape too… where we’ve stopped for lunch, where we spent a foggy night, where I bought handwoven place mats… We’ve done that stretch for more than 30 yrs now. I particularly like Dylan because I can sing along. I have no singing voice, nor does he. We’re a good match.