We Just Traveled Together.
I spent a week on the road with Shane, touring colleges throughout the Midwest. Given that we are both introverts, we – well, he – set a few ground rules before we left. These included “just knowing” when Shane didn’t feel like talking, and Shane handing Mom a snack when she started getting grouchy.
We packed 12 books on CD and a giant box of DVDs, just in case. I made a list of 30 podcasts that we could try, if we wanted to be entertained together. And Shane made a playlist of “Mom Songs” on Spotify that had been mostly pre-approved as not too “screamy.”
We didn’t get through the whole playlist. We didn’t listen to any books on CD. And neither of us wanted to watch a video. At one point, we stopped at Starbucks and watched 10 minutes of Groundhog Day before visiting the city in which it was filmed, but otherwise we didn’t watch any videos at all. I watched one hour of TV at one Air BnB while Shane listened to music. Looking back, we were really together – nearly every moment – for the full eight days. We didn’t talk, and we didn’t not talk. We just traveled together.
We did have moments – maybe a total of three hours during the week – when Shane said, “I’m going to get in the back if that’s okay.” And I’d listen to a library book for 45 minutes or so. I had a little more than four hours of listening left when we started on our journey; when we came home, I still had more than an hour to go before reaching the end of the book.
I crammed in a lot of driving, and stops that I hoped Shane would find interesting. We visited an abandoned amusement park. We saw filming locations of movies he liked: The Avengers, Home Alone, Groundhog Day and Amityville Horror. We stopped at A Christmas Story house and gift shop. We saw the birthplaces and childhood homes of Orson Wells, Walt Disney and Michael Jackson.
We valiantly tried to go to Six Flags Great America, only to be met by a closed gate (in spite of the website’s insistence that it was open). We stopped at John Hughes’ high school, where he’d directed scenes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club. We walked on the football field there, thrusting our hands in the air like Judd Nelson in his famous scene. We bought shirts from Mars Cheese Castle – and a truck stop in Lodi, Ohio.
Because of COVID, we stayed mostly in Air BnBs: a renovated farm house, a church deftly changed into an overnight palace, a basement turned into a pool hall, and a gorgeous loft by a lake. Shane had asked if we could stay in Air BnBs so that he – as yet unvaccinated – could feel safer than we did in any hotel during COVID.
And most importantly, we saw 18 colleges – 15 of which were actual contenders when we left home. By the time we finished our trip, Shane had narrowed that to three solid options and a whole lot that he called “a hard pass.”
We traveled through Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin – seven states in eight days. We drove 2,500 miles and walked at least a couple dozen more. Best of all: we left the house, saw the world, and came home safely.
Today, Shane gets his first vaccine. Life feels good again.