The Grand Tour
What would compel two women in their early thirties to load five young kids into a station wagon with a tent on the roof and drive across the country for a month? An overwhelming desire for adventure? A mild form of mental illness? Or was it just the life-affirming notion that travel is good for you and that it would expand the horizons of their young charges? I don’t know. I was only nine.
That happened in the summer of 1976, shortly after I finished third grade. My mom and my Aunt Betty packed me, my two younger brothers, and my two first cousins into a Ford Country Squire with the intention of being gone for a month and no expectation that we would be so frivolous as to spend money on motel rooms. There were no iPads, iPhones, GPS, or seatbelts. My little brother sat on the center console for a thousand miles. We had an 8-track tape deck, and we sang along to Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs and Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger over and over again. We played The Alphabet Game, and we played a lot of cards in the “way back.”
Our destination was the Grand Canyon, but like they say, it is the journey that matters. The journey took us to the state capitol in Austin, Muleshoe, Billy the Kid’s gravesite, Acoma “The Sky City,” the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, the Meteor Crater, the Four Corners, Mesa Verde National Park, Silverton, Colorado, the Royal Gorge, Capulin Mountain, and Amarillo. All are still there for you.
About thirty miles outside Amarillo, I recall asking my mother if the sun still set in the west. When she said yes, I informed her that we were driving north. She quickly recalibrated and turned around. At the south rim of the Grand Canyon, five kids spilled out of the car and ran to the simple railing protecting us from a 1,000-foot drop-off. This unnerved our moms enough that they left us in camp with strangers that evening to go back and watch the sunset alone (it set in the west there, too.)
It was in northern Arizona that the “Road to Shonto” entered family lore. My aunt read about this “picturesque Navajo village” a mere twenty miles off the highway, so off we went down a dirt road. This quick detour was almost immediately elongated by a herd of sheep that took about twenty minutes to cross the road. An hour or so later, we arrived in Shonto, which was nothing more than a couple of shanties selling rugs, jewelry, and pottery. We got suckered into a tourist trap in the middle of an Indian Reservation. Of course, we bought some crap and headed back to the highway.
At Acoma, my mother tried to drive up the gravel road to the top of the mesa. The station wagon couldn’t make the grade, and we started sliding backward. It was the first time I heard the word “Fuck!” We parked at the bottom and took the ancient footpath to the top of the 367-foot spire.
This was not the first road trip we took, but it was the beginning of a series of increasingly ambitious summer driving vacations that took us all over the United States. Mom eventually upgraded to a popup camper, which meant there was more room in the car for kids. I don’t know how we all got along after so many hours of driving each day. There might have been a few roadside spankings. There was definitely a lot of peanut butter and jelly and several innovative methods of peeing without stopping. I can’t say why they were crazy enough to take these trips, but I am eternally grateful that they did. The many “Roads to Shonto” I have taken since are an homage to them.
