Road Trip

by
Amanda Gradisek

When it came time to tackle the practical aspects of my moving 2500 miles across the country to Arizona, there was never any doubt that it would be my dad that would accompany me on this trek, despite the fact that I was uncertain as to whether my father and I had ever had a conversation between just the two of us that lasted longer than an hour--maybe fifteen minutes? At any rate, after using a line of people to pass my belongings into the fourteen foot U-Haul for hours and a depressing parting from my mother and friends, my father and I set out, at 1pm on a Saturday, towing my car on a trailer, with a rather modest goal of making it from Columbus, Ohio to Indianapolis by nightfall. With my only experience with roadtripping being a badass nonstop trip from Ohio to New Mexico, I hoped we might get a bit further.

Our conversation began at a rather simple level, but a three hundred foot tall cross in Illinois inspired a discussion on one of the points that my father and I always agreed on-organized religion. As night fell somewhere around the famous Gateway to the West in St. Louis, I tentatively selected music for the next hundred miles. As I did I remembered the last time I had suggested to my dad that he check out some of my music. "Dad," I said, "you should really listen to this song." After he had agreed and the song was over, I said, "So what did you think?" and he said, "Oh, I wasn't really listening." However, in retrospect, I realized that that was probably only a reflex after being forced to listen to New Kids on the Block when I was ten.

As my dad had never been to the Southwest, I suggested we head to Denver then down the Rocky Mountain front, and that first night we were stuck in a hailstorm in Kansas around four in the morning. But that didn't matter because at that point I believe we were deep in discussion about the wonders of Ohio State. On the road, my dad, who often seems to wonder if he shouldn't have been a truck driver rather than an optometrist, and I, simply loving a good road trip, were happy as could be. My dad could even tell people that he is a pig farmer, as he sometimes does. So we had no desire to stop. We arrived in Taos at around 3pm the next day, without having stopped for more than breakfast, and I finally got to show my dad something, after having always been on the receiving end. After some sleep and ten more hours on the road, we arrived in Tucson, and moved my things to the second floor apartment in the Arizona summer heat. But the best part was my dad getting to see the Southwest, and me knowing that he respected what I was doing.

Sometimes the hardest choices in moving involve arranging your living room-which my dad rather surprisingly willingly and almost eagerly helped me to do. We moved that room around at least ten times, only to discover that the first way was the best way. And then there's what I like to call the Target run. My dad, who hates shopping, was in Target three times in one day, and he didn't (really) complain. He even helped me pick out a lamp shade. But we broke up our days in the mountains and seeing what there was to see in my new home.

We were soon joined by the other half of the moving party and headed to the Grand Canyon, but the one of the best parts of the trip was when it was just my dad and me, hanging out, maybe in Target, realizing that we had a lot more in common than we thought. I got to see who my dad is when he's not weighed down by work and when he experiences something new and beautiful, like the Grand Canyon, and I think maybe we both realized we should have done it sooner.