Lessons

After a year of sitting at home, only dreaming about road-tripping, I have finally gotten back out there and come home again. Consequently, I find myself looking back on the Northeast. There are some things that I am sad to have not reached. There are others I am still awed to have seen with my own eyes. And, being home, I have had a chance to think about what went wrong and what went well.

The biggest thing that went wrong actually happened long (though not that long) before I set down in Maryland. My birthday was just before the trip. That wouldn’t matter under normal circumstances, but it was the same date that my driver’s license would expire. Unfortunately, Texas had gone to an online license renewal system that chose that time to break down spectacularly. That meant that I could not renew my license before we left. As you can imagine, car rental firms are hesitant to allow non-licensed drivers to operate their vehicles. This also turned out to be bad for me because I had made several plans involving evening and late-night forays that ended up having to be scrapped. I would have hit other counties between Baltimore and Wilmington, possibly finished Vermont, hit one of the missing Manchesters, and visited some New Jersey counties peripheral to the City. It also made me feel bad being a passenger while others did the driving. 

The other thing that was frustrating was that the part of me that wants to road-trip wants to get things done. Every extra county I get to is another entry I get to write, making it longer before I have to get out there again. And, as the African proverb supposedly says, “if you want to go fast, go alone.” Traveling with other people means having to work with and around their needs. I had quite an itinerary planned—another thirty counties—but much of it had to be set aside for the needs of the group. It had to be done, but I wanted to do so many things. Such plans I had … but maybe I shouldn’t have planned so much.

Of course, I didn’t finish the proverb. “If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.” And far we went. About two thousand miles. If I had been alone, I would have raced from county to county with little mind of anything else. But it was my friends who made me stop and see the world around me. And it was they who put up with me. I have some very special requirements when it comes to a county. Why would anyone care about courthouses except me? Yet they dragged me to courthouses all over creation, from tiny towns to the hearts of metropolises.

The lesson I came away with? Maybe I don’t have to do it all alone. I did Washington with someone else, and that was a good time; but this was my first time with a group. There is joy in companionship and shared experience. Even this lone wolf laughed a lot. I love being on the road alone, going from place to place, enjoying the solitude and the terrain; but I would do this again in a heartbeat.

The great takeaway is this: the part of me that wanted to get things done spent time raging that there was so much to do. That part of me was silenced by the rest of me—those parts that enjoyed it all. And these two disparate facets of me are both in complete agreement on one thing: we (and by we, I mean I) need to go back.