California to Ohio: Outrunning the Storm
You can drive ahead of it, but sooner or later, it will catch you.
When my daughter moved to Lakewood, Ohio, to live with her boyfriend, I began traveling across the country to visit her around her birthday. It wasn’t supposed to be a tradition, but since I spent every birthday with her for her entire life, I didn’t want to miss any.
Before she moved away, we went on road trips up the Oregon Coast or Solvang. We both loved staying at motels or hotels. I’ve never really understood why that is, but it just is. So when she left, we started a tradition of a few days of a road trip after her birthday.
The one thing no one tells you about raising kids is that they don’t like spending time with their parents so much. My daughter is obliging because she’s a good person, but I feel certain a road trip with her friends or her boyfriend would be more fun. But since I don’t see her once or twice a year, this is our compromise.
We usually have just a few days after her birthday to travel somewhere, either to Virginia, New York, or Maine, which is what we’ve done a few times and decided to do again this time. We left amid a rainstorm in Ohio and stayed just ahead of it, with the storm arriving as we left a place. Here in Bath, Maine, the storm finally caught up with us.
We did have one bright sunny day in Portland, Maine, a beautiful town full of college kids, ice cream shops, and runners hitting the trail by the water.
