Road Trip to Orlando: Why Did I Think Driving Was a Good Idea?

I need you to understand that I had just done the Denver to New York road trip two months earlier. I had been through the blizzard on the Turnpike. I had driven across Ohio twice. I knew what long road trips cost physically, logistically, spiritually.

And then I looked at flight prices to Orlando and said: we are driving.

My daughter's response: 'Mom. We just drove to New York.' My response: 'This will be shorter.' (It was not shorter. Denver to Orlando is approximately one thousand eight hundred miles. It is not shorter.)

Here is the thing about road trips that I keep relearning: the journey is actually the point. Not in a motivational poster way. In a real way. The hours in the car — just the two of you, music on, taking turns picking songs, watching the landscape change from mountains to plains to green to tropical — that time is not lost time. That time is your relationship being built.

We made up games. We had conversations that I don't think would have happened at home because at home there is always somewhere to go and something else to do. In the car there is nowhere to go. You are going. The going is the thing. And in the going, you talk.

She told me things during that Orlando drive that she had been keeping small. Not secrets — nothing alarming — but things she had been sitting with that were waiting for a long stretch of road and a reason to come out. I listened. I didn't solve them. I just listened, which is what she needed.

We drove through Texas. Texas takes longer than you think and the radio signal is inconsistent and there is a specific stretch that tests your faith in a way I believe is intentional.

We pulled into Orlando in the late afternoon and she said: 'I can't believe we drove here.' I said: 'I can't believe we drove here either.' We laughed about it. You can laugh about anything when you're on the other side of it.

The hotel was waiting. Disney was waiting. My feet were already preparing their legal paperwork.

Buckle up, buttercup. The long road teaches you things the short road can't.