Road-tripping is kind of our traveling sweet spot. It’s our thing. (Apparently so much so that we glow when we do it. Thank you, Instagram filter.)
I was telling a friend about my fantasy of taking a family Route 66 road trip one day, and she said something like “That would be my personal version of hell.” And while I certainly understand that not everybody gets particularly jazzed about the idea of sitting in confined spaces for days on end and subsisting largely on gas-station beef jerky…
I love it.
There’s actually nothing I love more. Being out on the road, stopping at little diners to try local specials, picking up weird pieces of art from roadside stands, getting lost once in awhile and not really caring…it’s my idea of paradise. (And we will be doing that family Route 66 road trip sooner or later – mark my words.)
Happily enough: Kendrick loves road-tripping too, and – maybe bizarrely – we never get along better than when we’re locked up in a car together for hours on end. Something about the empty space around us and the songs on the radio and the opportunity to talk and talk and talk about whatever just feels so good for our relationship. So freeing. So we’ve been spending these last couple of weeks before the baby arrives exploring this new part of the world with as many mini-road trips (more “day trips,” really, since we’re not staying overnight anywhere) as we can. So far we’ve been to Carmel, Mill Valley, Santa Cruz (twice), and Berkeley.
It’s strange to me that I’ve never been to Berkeley before, considering how much it seems like an obvious Place I’d Love – I even thought seriously about going to college there. The morning we left, we were eating breakfast at a diner down the street and started talking to a couple of women, and mentioned that we were planning on heading to Berkeley for the day, and they gave us a totally disgusted look and said, “Why would you want to go to Berkeley?”
I was pretty confused by this reaction, but now I’m going to just chalk it up to them being the kinds of people I probably wouldn’t have an especially good time hanging out with…because now that I’ve been, I think a better question is “Why wouldn’t you want to go to Berkeley?”
Like, forever.
Customizable ice-cream sandwiches – I went for mint chocolate chip sandwiched between enormous, warm chocolate chip cookies – for TWO DOLLARS (!!) at Cream…
Giving mom a heart attack at Mars Mercantile (lesson: we must tell a parent that we are hiding before commencing said hide)…
A brand-new necklace that all three of us agree is pretty much the coolest thing ever…
Sushi and succulents in the garden at Joshu-ya…
And a thrift-store find that doesn’t even come close to fitting me at the present moment, but that I couldn’t resist buying to tuck into high-waisted jeans this fall.
Tolkien speaks the truth. Sometimes, letting yourself get a little lost is the best thing you can do to help you finally find your way.
