8 Great Road Trips

This top eight list idea started on a road trip; I love a road trip; so naturally my first list would be road trips.

Here they are in chronological order:

Geneva to Lugano 1978

This was the annual trip our high school basketball team took to the big tournament. Our school was much smaller than the other contenders, and we rarely made it to the semi-finals, but Geneva had the only McDonalds within 200 miles of our school, and our bus always stopped there before we headed back through the Alps. Those french fries and shakes made the sting of getting spanked by the home team a little less painful.

Hamilton to Virginia Beach and back 1983

At the end of the January term our senior year 3 of my college friends and I decided to take the three days we had before the spring semester and go down to Virginia Beach where my mom was living. We left at about 10 at night and drove all the way through, arriving at the ocean just as the sun was rising. We spent the day and one night and then turned back north, breaking our return trip in DC with one of my high school buddies, where we ate fondue and drank beer and Jaegermeister by the fire long into the evening.

Austin to Santa Fe 1992

The first stop was San Antonio and that tiny adobe mission we know as the Alamo, then we ate the best cheese and bean enchiladas I have ever tasted at a roadside dive outside Del Rio. We dipped into Mexico for the afternoon and then drove north on 285 through the scrubby desert in the western panhandle of Texas. Crossing the Pecos River at sunset, the sandstone gorge was glowing red, lit by the golden light reflecting off the water. I'll never forget it.

Minneapolis to Rapid City and back 1997

Early in August, my mom had a conference to attend in South Dakota, and since I was on summer break she invited me to tag along. Heading west, it wasn't long before we left the Twin Cities way behind passing first through farm land and then over the Red River and into the prairie. Until then, I didn't realize exactly where the American west was located. After lunch and fantastic homemade pie at Al's on the Missouri River, our next stop was the Corn Palace in Mitchell. There I bought a paperback of O Pioneers by Willa Cather and read that story of hard scrabble and survival on the prairie as we drove across the same land. In the next four days, we saw the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, the Black Hills, Crazy Horse Monument, Deadwood, Devil's Tower, Wind Cave, AND Wall Drug.

Arlington to Bar Harbor and Buffalo 2005

Back when my oldest nephews were kids, we used to rent a minivan and drive to Mount Desert Island for a week of hiking and blueberry picking. This particular summer, we stopped in Buffalo on the way home and stayed with Heidi's folks, where we explored Niagara Falls, including Cave of the Winds, and camped on the shore of Lake Erie. We played Settlers of Catan at the picnic table, cooked our meals over an open driftwood fire, and the boys climbed the cliffs that towered over the lake beach.

Minneapolis to Medora and back, ND 2007

Heidi and I joined my mom and a couple of her book club friends for what we came to call the "Dead White Guy" tour of the upper midwest. Our first stop was Sauk Centre, birthplace of Sinclair Lewis and thinly disguised setting for his breakthrough novel, Main Street. From there we drove through Fargo and on to Valley City, which was the childhood home of one of our traveling companions. Then it was all the way across the state, through countless fields of sunflowers, to Medora, and Teddy Roosevelt National Park, home of the North Dakota Badlands. We did the famous steak fry and western show, and toured the park, pulling our van over to witness an actual wild stallion fight. On the return we stopped at Fort Mandan, Lewis and Clark's first winter headquarters.

Arlington to Isle of Palms 2011

We rented a beach house for spring break, and my mom flew in from Minnesota to drive down with us. My sister and her family traveled from Atlanta to meet us in Isle of Palms. We rented a minivan, and although Emily and Treat flew down later in the week, my brother and his dog joined me, Heidi, my mom, and our dog for the trip. We listened to 70s music and laughed all the way down I-95. The first morning we were there, the beach was covered in sea stars, and we thought it must just be like that there, but we didn't see anymore for the rest of the week.

Arlington to Rochester 2019

Heidi and Lucy and I drove west to spend the month of August in Minnesota with my mom. It was a lot of highway, but we passed through Michigan City, where my grandfather was born and raised, and Chicago, the skyline bright at 11 at night. We found a couple of dog parks not far off our route so that Lucy could run a bit, and feasted on fantastic hot Italian sandwiches a couple blocks from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. We admired the glacier carved sandstone in the Dells and cheered when we crossed the St. Croix River entering Minnesota in the 24th hour of our journey. After so many years of visiting my mom out there, it was kind of cool to have my dog and my car there, too. Over the month, we drove back and forth from the Cities to Rochester many times, over the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, past the refinery where my mom worked, through farms with fields of corn and soy beans, gray barns and horses, wind breaks and wind mills to the tidy town with numbered streets and avenues and a world-famous clinic at its heart.