When I was little, we took a ton of car trips, because we really couldn’t afford to fly (at least, that’s what I figured.) Some of them were short – one hour to my grandparents’ house – and some were really long – like the 10 hours to my other grandparents’ house. Then the ones I remember the most were the three day sojourns from South Florida all the way to Western New York.

We used to load up my grandpa’s ’56 Lincoln (the kind with suicide doors!) and start the long drive. I can’t seem to recall how far we got that first day. Maybe Georgia? It’s about five or six hours from Palm Beach to the Florida/Georgia border. What I remember with the most vivid detail is when the landscape began to change and mountains popped up. I was apparently a squirmy kid (I don’t recall this but my mom tells me so) and they used to stick me in the front between my Grammy and Grandpa. I relished in seeing all the new cities and landscapes first. When field gave way to roads cut into mountains, I got excited.

I really remember Virgina. We always stayed in a Red Roof Inn or a Knight’s Inn, but only if it had a pool. The best time was when my grandpa even got in to play with us. It was cool out (probably October) but the pool was heated and steam billowed off its surface, which reflected the lights of the hotel that gleamed in the late dusk. The next day we went into Virginia and there was a rest stop we always used right before we went up into the mountains. I didn’t like feeling like it was the last stop; last chance before we were fully entrenched in the mountainside.

The third day was all Pennsylvania and New York. Most of New York is not city, but I never really knew that. A lot of it looks like Scranton, PA. (If you’ve ever been there, you’ll know what I mean.) But so much of the countryside out there is so drastically different than down South. On some roads, where we were walled in on either side by steep shale and limestone; water ran freely from cracks in the stone. Once you get out of that, there’s Amish country, which weirded me out. Every time they saw our car and turned their backs, I wondered just what kind of lifestyle they lived.

When we got to our destination, we all fell out of the car, exhausted from all that driving, and went into the old farmhouse owned by family out in the country:

These trips are engrained in my memory as some of the best times spent with my family and Exploring the East Coast. There was really only one mishap: we were in Maine, pulling up to (I think) either a restaurant or museum with a semi-circle drive. And somehow I opened the back door and went swinging out of the car, my face dangerously close to the pebbles on the drive as my mother held me by the back of my shirt. That scared me shitless and from then on, I left the door handles alone!