Time Is Of The Essence

And the Essence is Sweet

Photo by Lauren Kay on Unsplash

At the beginning of summer, I finally took (more or less) a true road trip. It wasn’t some thrilling cross-country adventure where I ditched responsibility and threw caution to the wind, but it was pretty great nonetheless.

My youngest kid needed to arrive in Michigan’s upper peninsula, which turned out to be about an eleven-hour stretch if I were to drive it at one stretch, so I decided not to. Instead, I enlisted a friend I’ve known for thirty years, recognizing that thirty years is a damn long time.

We shrugged off most of the “Thelma and Louise” references, only mentioning the characters once or twice, and promising not to end our trip by spectacularly careening off a cliff to our deaths. Her husband would have been pretty peeved if we’d done that, so it was off the activities list right from the start.

We didn’t want to delay much in getting the kid close to the Canadian border — he would be working at a summer camp — so we made good time the first two days and ditched him with all the other teenagers pretty handily. After that, though, the trip back stretched out before us with a series of unplanned days and unsupervised itineraries.

Again, the distance from Northern Michigan back to Maryland’s Inner Harbor is not exactly the stuff of great road trip adventure movies, but…