(Editor’s note: One Gwinnett couple has enjoyed the open highway, driving and enjoying the idea of travel. We asked for a short summation of their trips. Here’s his version.—eeb)
By Rick Krause
LILBURN, Ga. | “On the road again; I just can’t wait to get on the road again….”
When my wife Sandy and I would hear that song, we got eager to make a road trip; or if we were already starting one, we sang it.
A move with my parents from Nebraska to Washington in 1947, and several road trips throughout the west and my mom’s love of driving trips, really piqued my interest in travel. Relocations to Arizona for university, to upstate New York and then Brunswick, Georgia for work, had me traveling extensively around those locations.
I met and married Sandy in 1970. She was living on St. Simons Island. It was from Brunswick that our road trips really began and have continued, now from Lilburn. We always snapped many photos of our trips; Sandy kept a daily log.
I used a map to show the routes we took together. We started the map in 1970 and have kept it to this day, although there are trips that undoubtedly I forgot to include. It’s clearly low-tech—AAA map of the States, routes shown from a magic marker. Although it includes some trips in Canada, it doesn’t include them all, and it doesn’t include the extensive driving we’ve done in Alaska and Mexico.
Most of our early trips were in a Volkswagen Squareback, from which we could camp and if necessary, sleep stretched out in the back. Our road trips involved mostly tent camping—two-person or a 9×9 umbrella tent. In the early years, we camped a lot in non-camping dedicated sites, such as city and county parks, roadside rest areas, other public lands, and just off the road, where feasible, and even in the Squareback on the parking lot of the nation’s capitol (1971).) The trips were about the travel, scenery, sightseeing, and sometimes, the destination, but very seldom the lodging. Most trips were taken to immerse ourselves in nature, botanizing, birding, animal spotting and such.
One of our first trips that we repeated several times, from our home in Lilburn to Yakima, to Olympia, and other times to Seattle.
Those began after work on Friday, and would have us driving straight through until Saturday evening when we would camp in the Badlands, South Dakota, before continuing to Washington. Because of the repeating of such trips, the map doesn’t illustrate all the trips, only the routes. We traveled several routes numerous times. But we sought to take new routes, often blue highways. Two hearts, two minds, one roadmap.
Our last long-distance trip was one we took in 2019 north into Canada and west to Washington and down to California and east to home. The trip lasted a month and spanned 8,500 miles. A “lesser” trip, but more recent was to visit my brother in Arizona and a continuation to Southern California to see the Salton Sea and Joshua Tree National Park—one of the few National Parks we hadn’t seen to date. That was in April of last year and spanned 4,580 miles; as usual, we seldom drove on Interstate highways.
These recent ones utilized lodging, with seldom night driving. We still love such road trips, seeing new scenery and sites and having adventures along the way—therapy for the soul.
Now we’re singing the Hank Snow classic: “I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere.”
