Holiday travels

For a creature of habit who craves routine, these past few weeks have been waaaaay out of my comfort zone. But! It’s all good, for sure. First, there was the convention in San Antonio – the last time I posted was from down there. Since then, there has been a lot of family time – no surprise there, the holidays – but also a LOT of time and miles along the eastern seaboard (I have a renewed appreciation for the awfulness of the I95 corridor from between New Jersey to Washington, D.C.). In what may become a new tradition, we visited family in the South – my sister and her family in Myrtle Beach, followed by my brother-in-law and his family in Fort Myers, FL. Spoiler alert: We did NOT fly; we DID drive (you probably already figured that out). A lot. More than 3,500 miles on a rental van in the span of a week. Every mile was well worth it, and fueled liberally by coffee (Pilot gas station coffee is surprisingly good!) and by Channel 29 on Sirius XM (Phish radio, which now supplants Channel 23/Grateful Dead as my favorite satellite station). Healthy doses of both allowed us (I did the vast majority of the driving) to make the 1,401-mile journey from Fort Myers to Hyde Park in one, mega, 23-hour cannonball run – starting at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday and arriving home at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, a trip that featured a nearly 50-degree drop in temperature (December in Florida vs. December in the mid-Hudson Valley … duh). Driving that long with five disparate personalities – one well-adjusted adult (my wife Heidi), three children at varying states of maturity, and me – had its challenges. I won’t bore you with the highlights and the battles, but one quote sticks out, from our youngest son, 13-year-old James: “Wow, I can’t imagine what this trip would have been like 20 years ago. Must have been so boring, like you’d have to read books and stuff.” Yeah. That. Instead, the passengers passed around the phone charger (hey, yours is at 56 percent, let ME have it now!) like the valued commodity it is on such journeys. We experienced warmth – the Florida sun in the mid-80s is glorious – of both the weather and of family. Will we do this trip again in future years, exactly as this time? Not likely. But some variation of it will be on the table for future Christmas/New Year’s celebrations, as we try to establish new holiday traditions. Photos: Above, our kids with their Fort Myers cousins; James and I entering our favorite southern restaurant; sign I saw while jogging on Sanibel Island!