Road Trip

We recently took a family road trip. This is always an interesting time to see how people in a limited space can tolerate each other, get a bit of their own vacation by doing what they want and attempt to have fun together. Interesting habits crop up. On this particular trip with my 15 and 17 year olds and my husband, cleaning the car became a salient topic. This cleaning took place in the midst of a 2200 mile road trip with multiple stops that involved everything from car camping to nights’ with friends and hotels. My son and I are closely aligned in terms of keeping things clean. We’re both very visual and too much stimuli in the visual field can completely overwhelm us quickly. The traditional drive-through-road -trip lunch seems to always produce way too many wrappers and cups and straws and food containers. An environmental nightmare but also an visual and olfactory nightmare. The wrappers sprinkled throughout the car can quickly overload our fragile systems! At one point my 17 year old said, “every rest area we go by is an opportunity to throw trash away.” I completely agreed!

On the other hand, my husband and my daughter tend to be those folks who can tolerate leaving some stuff around until a very convenient time arrives when they might throw it away. No sense in stopping for no good reason and delay the arrival time. My son and I tend to look for the rest area and perhaps even will make an excuse or lie about needing a bathroom or feeling more comfortable it we “top off the gas tank now” just in order to hurl out some trash.

We experienced many moments on this trip as a family, some frustrating but many wonderful. It is the continued practice of tolerance and acceptance and respect of each other and others’ needs that creates cohesion of the parts. It is a hard practice but worth doing. If we don’t keep practicing to let go of the used Chipotle container at our feet as the plastic edge rubs our bare ankle, we will never learn to let the bigger issues go!