Road trip!

Think back on your most memorable road trip.

When I was a kid, the only road trips we ever took were from Eastern Kansas, where we lived, to visit my mom’s family in Indiana. These trips were long car rides with five or six kids crammed into the car. The most memorable sight on our usual route to Indiana was the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri; I also liked driving across the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

On my most memorable family road trip, we combined a visit to mom’s family with a return trip through Oklahoma to see my adult brother, who was stationed at Fort Sill at the time. I was in college and home for the summer. To get to Oklahoma, we drove through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

It wouldn’t have taken long to drive through Kentucky or Tennessee. I remember driving through the Ozarks in Arkansas, or at least an area with hills and a lot of trees. There was a nuclear power plant. That was memorable because I had never seen one before.

The most memorable sight in Arkansas was a real, live roadrunner! It wasn’t just a cartoon character!

Oklahoma was also memorable to me because the dirt was red, unlike the soil in Kansas. Just today, I learned that in 1987, a few years after our visit, the state of Oklahoma designated port silt loam as the official state soil.

This trip down memory lane brings back memories of things I saw for the first time. It also brings back memories of mom, a single mother driving hundreds of miles to see her family. I miss you, Mom.