Wednesday, June 07, 2006

It's Not a Road Trip - It's a Vacation!

Normal people would take the air force up on their kind offer to fly us to Alaska. They would count up the miles from San Angelo, Texas to Anchorage, measure out the size of a Saturn sedan, eyeball the three young children who would share the back seat, and they would humbly and thankfully accept the plane tickets, saying a silent prayer of gratitude for modern forms of transportation.

Normal people are sissies.

We liked road trips. The drive from Albuquerque to San Angelo when Kirk came to pick me up after I graduated was one of the best days we had had together up until then. When you're on the road everything else has to drop away, and you're left with simply getting from one place to another slowly and calmly with nothing to do but talk to the person you like the best. Air planes in contrast, at least air planes in company with little kids, are a hassle. Ours were always really well behaved actually - in fact after every flight we ever took with the kids when they were young people came up to us and thanked us for our quiet, polite children - but getting everyone there in time, wrestling with the necessary equipment to keep three children polite and quiet, hustling the whole crew from gate to gate and in and out of seats was no fun. And no matter how nice your kids continue to be, there's always the horrible feeling that they might suddenly begin shooting green flames out of their eyeballs or something so you can't really relax.

So we didn't really consider not driving. Besides, who could pass up the chance to drive the Alcan?

We followed someone's amazingly good advice and bought ourselves a Milepost, then plotted out our 3,000 mile trip. This was going to be good.

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