On the Road Again

Yesterday morning I was woken up by the voice of my grandmother on the answering machine, going on and on about where she and my grandfather are right now.

My grandparents (my mother's parents) are rapidly approaching their 80's-- a fact that I am acutely and sadly aware of-- but they are hardly sitting in their living room knitting and napping. Oh no-- from the time my mother and her siblings were young, J.O. and Emily have had a very serious passion in life: road trips. Age, retirement, and an empty nest have not slowed them down; on the contrary, Momma Em and Daddy J are now in hyperdrive when it comes to their travels. Their home is full of scrapbooks documenting their travels to Massachusetts, Wyoming, Hawaii, and all the spaces in between (no, a "road trip" to my grandparents is hardly a day trip to Memphis).

Right now, Momma Em and Daddy J are on their way to Wyoming. They probably haven't passed through a city they haven't visited before yet, and Emily could tell you what she ate at each restaurant she's visited in any given city (it's where I get my sick memory). The first few days of their trips, they plan out and reserve hotel rooms. But for the rest of the journey, they stop where they please and go by no schedule (other than that if there is a tourist trap, they WILL stop there).

It's fabulous, the life they live. And I hope when I'm in my mid-seventies my husband and I (okay, first of all, I hope I have a husband) are as awesome as my grandparents.