Ah, yes. Road trips. The road. On the road. Many a fine piece of literature/song/art has been produced with thoughts of the open road, inspired merely by the thought of traveling to the unexplored. Even my book, Somewhere Over the Sun, has plenty of road-tripping and traveling going on.
I took a road trip from Las Vegas to San Francisco this weekend to dine with some family in celebration of my great-uncle’s 70th birthday. It was a great weekend, but this post isn’t about my familial pleasures; it’s about the road. Okay, it’s not really about the road. It’s about a few random thoughts, perhaps road-related, that occurred to me on my travels this weekend.
Every night, I check my Google Analytics for this site. For those unfamiliar with the program, it’s a way for me to track how many of you lovely people view my site every day, how long you spend on it, and one of my favorite bits of info: where in the world you are. Every day, I see about 20 to 30 cities listed in my Analytics, some I’ve been to, some I haven’t. Most of these cities are full of people I have absolutely never met.
Being on the road this weekend reminded me about all the lives I am not privy to. All of you, whether you’re first-and-only-time visitors or constant readers, are living lives that, despite my knack for creating stories, I simply have no idea about and can’t accurately imagine. You’re going to parks I’ve never been to and never will, or stopping by the same Barstow coffee shop where my family and I stopped at due to my mother’s Starbucks addiction and my sister’s pea-sized bladder (hey-oh, pun!). Maybe you’re the woman with the perfect collarbones in Barstow. How do you do anything other than keep those collarbones perfect? Your concentration must be wrapped up in them.
The road has a way of putting distances in perspective. Eight and a half hours each way at 75 miles-per-hour covered such a tiny fraction of land, such a tiny fraction of human population, yet it’s so much more than previous generations could have conceived to travel. Power lines in the middle of nowhere; instantly accessed information on the internet; internet; the ability to be constantly in contact with anyone. Life’s changed, and traveling puts that in perspective.
Speaking of life and poor transitions, I was hit by a lovely realization while recently helping a few friends through less-than-stellar times. You know how we all have a bad dozen photographs floating around untagged on Facebook? Even gorgeous people have been snapped in an unattractive sneer. They live their lives being generally beautiful, sometimes making ugly faces that go unnoticed until a camera records evidence of their moments of imperfection. Life’s a lot like that. Every now and then, we look at life and see ugliness. It doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful, it’s just as prone to being un-photogenic as the rest of us.
