How to Take a Road Trip, Step 1: Plan Your Route

“Hey Sherrie. How’s your week been?”

It’s the afternoon of Friday, April 10, 2020. I have two weeks of vacation starting Monday, April 13. I am calling or instant messaging all of the senior managers and partners I work with at the firm to confirm things are all set for my time away. We recap client deliverable dates, I indicate what has been delegated to whom.

Sherrie, one of the partners I work with, asks about my time off.

I thought about cancelling one or both weeks of the vacation when I figured out we were definitely going to be spending it at home, courtesy of COVID-19. Part of what I love about my job is getting to work with tons of different clients across the span of a year. But one of the joys of having a diverse and plentiful client base is coordinating scheduling for all of them. This often results in scheduling projects several months in advance. If I want to be serious about vacations, I have to plan a majority of the time off I am taking for the calendar year in December of the prior year. Canceling these weeks and then hoping free time will present itself later in the year is a pipe dream.

“Obviously you’re not going anywhere now. What did you have planned originally?”

“Basil and I were going to take a road trip. We were going to stop in Taos, Phoenix, Tucson, San Diego, San Jose, Sonoma, Reno, and Salt Lake.”

“Wow! Did you plan that all on your own?”

This question surprises me. As opposed to what? Hiring a travel agent?

“Yep. I grew up in Arizona and lived in California for a while, so I know my way around.”

I want to add that even if I didn’t know my way around, I would have used Google Maps to point myself in the right direction. We both travel for a living, Sherrie for a decade and a half more than I have. I wonder if I should chalk this up to some kind of generational difference. Or do I have a hidden talent?

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My mother was an auditor/consultant too for many years. Although I took road trips with my parents together, a majority of them were with just my mother. She would often take me with her on week-long work trips, even during the school year. When she started auditing, her territory covered Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah. Trips could be a short two to three hour ride (Show Low, AZ) or a very long day’s drive (Salt Lake City, UT).

She worked as a medical bill auditor for a pharmacy benefits management company. In advance of her visit, she would be given medical bills, typically for patients who had endured very long hospital stays. She would reconcile each pharmacy-related item the patient was billed for against all the available medical record evidence to determine if the patient was billed accurately and, in turn, that whatever her company had been asked to reimburse for was accurate.

Part of this work was straight arithmetic: looking at printouts from hospital registers, documenting every time a patient had been given one pill or another, and counting every single pill to compare against the final billing. And not just expensive or unique medications, but EVERYTHING: every ibuprofen (aka Advil) and other cheap drug had to be counted too.

My mom started to pay me help count the cheaper, less-complicated, and more numerous items from the time I was twelve or thirteen. I would take a ruler and a highlighter to go through the hospital registers, and use an erasable pen to make the hash marks on a tally sheet. I really liked the work: it only took me another twenty years or so to figure out I wanted to be a traveling auditor too.

Just like the community banks I visit on my travels now, many of the hospitals she had to travel to were located in more rural communities/areas. Bigger towns or small towns never mattered much to me. I loved just riding in the car, watching the scenery of the southwest go by. I liked sitting in the hospital lobby waiting rooms, where I would color, write, or complete kids’ learning workbooks. I liked being left alone, as I knew it meant my mother trusted me to be good.

I loved seeing all the different hospital gift shops, which my mother was nice enough to take me after she had finished her meetings with hospital administrators. I always wanted something else to draw on or write in. My younger brother loved stuffed animals for many years, which was a convenient thing for a parent to shop for in a hospital gift shop. It was unusual for us to leave one without making at least one purchase.

While my parents were semi-functional adults, I don’t remember either of them being big planners. Most of the things that happened in our lives seemed to result from catering to a whim, passion, or desire. Dinner parties occurred frequently because we bought food and drink by the truckload and friends were always willing to stop by to enjoy these things with us. A specific bed time wasn’t assigned, but rather happened when one was tired and fell asleep, whether that was in an actual bed, on the couch in the living room, or out on a lounge chair by the pool. I assume my ability to plan trips stems in part from traveling with my mother for her job, although perhaps I am giving her too much credit.

It would be years between the time I figured out I loved road trips until I was old enough to get away with taking one on my own. As I progressed towards the legal driving age of 16, I began to learn where all of the streets in Mesa went, and where the freeway systems in Phoenix could take me. The plot of my first novel, which I wrote during 7th and 8th grade, centered around a group of teens driving a Pink Cadillac on a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York City.

Before I had my own car in high school and college, I was convincing my friends to let me drive them on road trips in their cars, usually to L.A. The couple professors I had in college who kept track of me often remarked they were surprised by how I would often taken someone up on an invitation to drive somewhere for the weekend, like Las Vegas. I never understood their surprise: if you had enough money for gas, food, and a place to crash, why the hell wouldn’t you go?

My vision of the world remains the same today: when I know I have a place I want or need to go, I start thinking of all the different ways I can get there, all the different routes available to me. I still delight in seeing billboards, roadside attractions, population signs, and all of the other eye candy which awaits on a route I have never traveled before. These things are the individual spices which make up the recipe of where ever you are traveling through and headed to. Even when you have gone somewhere before, the drive there is never exactly the same: different cars, different songs on the radio, maybe a new gas station has been built. You never know.

As I have grown older and happier with my life, I have learned to appreciate the joys which can be had staying at home, in one place. But I am still always thinking about and looking forward to the next long drive.