January 2nd of this new year I found myself driving across the barren landscape of Wyoming (again) with two children in the back seats reading, one child looking out the window, Clint snoozing after driving through hours and hours of snow and ice covered roads, and Papa joining him in sweet la la land. The sun was piercingly beautiful against the backdrop of a cloudless deep blue sky and the snow covered Medicine Bow National Forest we were driving through. And as usual I was enjoying just letting my mind wander and wonder. Driving can be so therapeutic. I started thinking about how many miles we had driven and would drive over a span of 14days alone (4390 to be exact), and began to wonder how many thousands of miles my children had traveled since they each had become a part of our family. I chuckled as I thought about how many times Honey has said to me "Their poor little butts have GOT to be wore completely out!" Needless to say, when I tell people my kids are the world's best travelers I am in no way, shape, or form exagerrating. They truly are the best! It is often asked, "How did you get them to do that?". Well the blaring truth is we've never really thought about it, just put them in the car and gone. So I guess it's called the "get in the car and go" method. Ha ha ha.
A lot of our very best memories are from the road trips we've taken together. I'm not just speaking of the destinations, I'm talking about the journeys to get there. With as hectic as life can get, pulling us in so many different directions, spending time together in a car (for us at least) is a way to reconnect without interruption or distraction. We talk and share and bust out in song and joke and make faces and laugh our heads off. We have spans of sweet comfortable silence, off in each of our own worlds, yet close enough to reach out and hold a hand all at the same time. We have quality time together and the all too often overlooked and underated quantity time to go with it. And the five of us are among the rare people on the planet to know what a serious case of the "Weegie Weegies" is...travel far enough and you'll know what I'm talking about. Of course you'll have to have our warped sense of humor to recognize it when it happens.
As amazing as the journeys themselves are, having stood in some of the most beautiful places in the world and sharing it with each other is, well, priceless. A treasure. The joy of experiencing it together is what takes something awe-inspiring and transforms it into something even more. A beautiful waterfall is just a beautiful waterfall until you have a hand wrapped in yours to share it with. To witness the awe and wonder on three little faces, to hear the gasps and oohs and wows and the "that is so cools" is, well, I guess you just have to be there. I wouldn't trade our big adventures together for anything.
I came home from our latest trip with a mission to total the number of miles Erika, Kail, and Jackson have traveled. I narrowed it down to only trips to destinations 200 miles away or more, and even then these are very conservative estimates. I also divided the mileage into driven vs. flown.
After quite a few hours, a fair amount of memory jogging, and a lot of figuring and number crunching later I have the estimates in miles that my three little troopers have gone. Erika: Driven - 83,824 Flown - 24,942 Total - 108,266
Kail: Driven - 46,259 Flown - 15,306 Total - 61,565
Jackson: Driven - 38,429 Flown - 9296 Total - 47,691
To put those miles into perspective, Erika has traveled far enough to go around the earth 4 1/2 times, Kail 2 1/2, and Jackson nearly 2.
Simply put, I cherish all the roads we have traveled together, and can hardly wait to see where the ones left unexplored will lead us to next.
