In early June, Rice and I checked off destinations #47, 48, and 49 on our quest to see all 50 of the United States. Yup, we’ve now ticked off both Dakotas and Montana, hopefully just on paper.
We’ve been on this journey for quite a few seasons now. Even so, there are always new places to see, experiences to share, and lessons to learn—mostly about ourselves, truth be told.
Here are some observations from our most recent road trip:
1. There are two types of traveling couples: those who like to travel together just the two of them, and those who do not. Sure, some like to mix it up and do both—maybe the beach with other couples, but new destinations just themselves. Neither approach is right or wrong, mind you. What’s important is knowing and respecting your own personal inclinations. (And may God and compromise help you if you and your partner don’t align here.)
For giggles, Rice and I sometimes gauge our ongoing travel compatibility, like at a stop in Medora, where I spotted two men our age traveling together in Corvettes. “Are you part of a club?” I asked one “No,” he said, “just friends.” On closer look, I saw each had a woman in his vehicle; one looked like an original wife (or girlfriend), the other a newer model. When I got back to our car, I asked Rice if he’d like to rent something sporty and try some double-date traveling down the road. He restarted the car, waited a beat, and finally said, “Nah.” I exhaled relief.
2. No matter how well you plan, surprises will arise. Some of these might be good, like winning big at one of Billings’ 95 casinos—which, no, we didn’t do. Our surprises were more like car trouble in Wisconsin and a power outage at check-in when we got to our Dickinson hotel.
3. Yes, Southerners are hospitable, but Midwesterners win the prize for being NICE. And just for the record, I’m oh, so tired of folks who consider being nice a weakness. From Evansville, where the waiters and bartenders talked AND listened to us, to Madison, where the folks at the VW dealership fit in an emergency fix in less than 90 minutes, everyone was incredibly nice. Same goes for the hotel maintenance guys in Dickinson who schlepped our luggage up the stairs for us because the elevator was out…and then declined a tip. Midwestern nice on full display.
4. Despite what it looks like on social media, there is no way to see and do it all during travel. It’s easy to let the quest for a perfect journey interfere with enjoying an exceptional one. For instance, we debated skipping Montana this round because we couldn’t fit it all in. Was Billings the most picturesque part of the state? Probably not. But we loved its kick-ass murals, its walkable downtown, and an amazing Vegan-friendly restaurant (Walker’s) across from our hotel.
5. On the topic of food…. If you travel with a donut aficionado in search of THE BEST of THE BEST in every town visited, don’t join in the hunt and expect the scale to like you once you return home. Also don’t point out that donuts may not be Vegan-friendly. And try not to have too big a tantrum when the donut-eating Vegan weighs in two pounds lighter upon the return home.
6. Nothing is quite so blue as the Western sky.
7. Traveling as a couple works best—for us, at least—if you build in some down time to be apart. It took several trips for us to learn this, but we’re getting the hang of it now. He likes to face the day with coffee and breakfast and time at the gym; I like to ease into a less-structured morning. He is a history-loving man who’s never met a landmark he couldn’t study for hours; I like a Spark notes version of the past and enjoy landscapes and terrains over markers and monuments.
8. There’s something about cemeteries, though. Both Rice and I enjoy visiting them. (Just to clarify, we like to visit as living beings.) Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery didn’t disappoint. It fascinated me to learn it segregated its dead. There was an Old West area where Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane laid in rest, but also Jewish and Chinese sections, a special area for children, and a potters field where paupers and indigent people were buried. Apparently, this is not an unusual practice, this segregation in burial grounds. Who says a woman of a certain age can’t learn new things?
9. On the topic of learning…. Traveling couples would be wise to learn how to deal with daily spats. Personally, Rice and I like to deal with them the Ted Lasso way. You know: “Be a goldfish,” a creature with such a short attention span, it’s easy to forget and move on. But if that fails, there’s always the Honey-and-Rice way, which is to look for the fun (or funny) in the inevitable irritations. Here’s an example. Me: “Now don’t get irked with yourself and burrow your head up your ass if this route turns out to be bad.” Him: “I won’t.” [Smirk] “Unless it’s to shut out your complaints about the GPS lady’s tone as she recalculates our route.” Sigh.
10. Finally, whenever possible, build in some special stops to visit with people who have touched your lives in a special way along your journey. Letting them know what they meant to you once upon a time is golden. And sometimes, learning how much you still connect provides an icing too delicious to describe.
On this trip, we caught up with some of Rice’s debate buddies from college, folks we’ve seen through the years, which has always been a delight. In addition, we reconnected with one of my college roommates, the maid of honor in our wedding. We hadn’t seen her in forty years, but we picked up as though no time had passed at all. What a pleasure—a privilege, even—to relive sweet memories and make new ones with Lyn and Doug, David and Michele. Love and safe travels, dear friends, wherever the road takes you next.
As I try to digest all this, a visit to state #50 lies on the horizon for Rice and me. Fingers crossed that our health, love, and patience for one another hold up through July.
I’m optimistic.
Still, I’m working on that goldfish thing. Really.
Cheers ~ J
When I initially sat down to write this post, I had nothing. Nada. Absolutely no topic nudged me to say, “Write about me this month.” I was feeling meh. Worse. I worried I’d forgotten how to have fun.
This struck me as crazy, given my past few weeks. They’d been filled with day trips, house guests, and end-of-school activities. Time on the water, family outings, and getting back to the garden. But instead of feeling jazzed to write about these experiences, I felt exhausted. Empty.
Then I discovered a new (to me) podcast called Kelly Corrigan Wonders, specifically,her January 25, 2022 episode (Season 1, Episode 72) called The 2022 Regroup: The Power of Fun. On it, Kelly talks with Catherine Price, science journalist and author of The Power of Fun – How to Feel Alive Again.
I listened to science-based facts about how fun reduces stress, which impacts our hormone levels, making us more relaxed, resilient, and productive. Yada yada, I’d heard it all before. Yet listening to the podcast reminded me of something equally important: Each of us has our own collection of activities, settings, and people that generates fun.
Each of us has our own fun magnets.
Hearing this stirred a memory. When our granddaughter Charli was three, my daughter Quinn ribbed me that Charli said all her grandparents spoiled her except her JJ (me). I bristled a little but shrugged it off. Until Charli’s next visit, when I had to learn more.
“Do I spoil you?” I asked.
“No.”
“But your Nana and PauPau and Big Daddy do?”
“Yes.”
She said this without sounding bitter, with more maturity than I was feeling myself. Brooding, I couldn’t help but wonder. Was I being too stern with her? Did I not pepper her with enough treats?
“Charli,” I pressed, “how do your other grandparents spoil you?”
She cocked her head. “You know.”
I didn’t. And her expression radiated a message: I was an idiot. But she loved me anyway. She walked over to me and reached up her arms.
“They do this,” she said, wriggling her fingers under my armpits as though she was scratching an itch. “Ticka. Ticka. Ticka.”
“They tickle you?” I felt my eyes widen. “That’s how they spoil you?”
She giggled an affirmation, continuing to tickle me until I giggled, too.
To this day, I don’t like being tickled. It reminds me of when I was little, how my sisters would pin me down and tickle me until I practically cried. It was all in fun (I think!), but holy man, I vowed to never do that to anyone else.
To Charli, though, being tickled is fun. It’s being spoiled and loved. For her, it’s a fun magnet—something that makes her feel playful and connected and in the flow, all at the same time.
It’s great to discover and share a family’s overlapping fun magnets. If we can find them. Media paint others’ lives as a series of overlapping happy moments. They’re not. But when we feel like we’re not having fun like everyone else, we blame ourselves. We feel isolated and inadequate. Or maybe just meh.
For years, a personal fun magnet for me focused on quarterly Sunday dinners where extended family ate and played catch-up, capping it all off with a toothy family photo. It took me a long time to realize that wasn’t a magnet, it was a fantasy. Mine. And mine alone.
Yet sometimes, life surprises us. In early May, our family gathered—not on a Sunday, but on a Saturday. We combined a couple birthdays with an early Mother’s Day. We met at a bowling alley, wolfed down pizza and pretzels, and topped it all off with a whole lotta strikes and gutters. After I begged, the family posed for a photo, and when Rice posted it on Facebook (see below), a friend asked him this question:
“Are you short less?”
Oh, my. He isn't, but in my humble opinion, the photo effect is fabu. Unintentional, yes. Still, a lovely surprise.
And maybe that’s the point about fun. Often slippery and elusive, it ebbs and flows, never constant. If its absence becomes constant, we need to seek help. If it merely evades us now and again, perhaps we can get by granting ourselves a little extra grace.
Having fun sometimes takes more work than we’d like. Other times, it shows up when and where we least expect it.
But it isn’t optional. Our lives depend on it.
So tell me, m'darlin', are we having any fun yet?
In June 1999 at an extended family getaway, my sister Lisa—then 35, athletic, the youngest of five girls—showed up in a state of poor health and exhaustion. Her bouncy step was a mere shuffle, and she complained that her muscles had ached for months, ever since she contracted a virus she couldn’t shake. At our mom’s insistence, I drove her to a local medical center, where blood and urine tests delivered shocking results. Lisa was in acute renal failure, her kidneys operating at only 7 percent.
She qualified for placement on the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) list immediately after returning home and starting dialysis. A two-port catheter was inserted into her chest, one to remove blood from her body for cleansing, the other to re-feed the cleansed blood back into her system. That became Lisa’s new normal, reporting for dialysis every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m.
“I really feel lucky,” she told me back then. “I can drive myself to and from dialysis, continue to teach, and still work out.”
Lucky? God love her. That catheter remained part of her life for 11 months. So did the low-sodium, low-potassium, low-protein, and ridiculously low-liquid diet prescribed for patients undergoing dialysis. As the months crept on, her immune system weakened, and she developed several infections that required medications with harrowing side effects, like extreme dizziness and fatigue.
Questions and concerns plagued the whole family. How do we get this strange party—this transplant journey—started? Could one of Lisa’s four sisters serve as a living donor? Where would the transplant take place? What do you mean the lab lost one of the sisters’ bloodwork? Why did so many books on transplant focus on technical issues? Or ethics? We just wanted to see Lisa well and living a quality life once again.
Fast forward to today, when all is well because Lisa did receive a kidney from our sister Tina at the University of Michigan’s Transplant Center in Ann Arbor. The procedure took place in June 2000, and both sisters recovered well and remain healthy still.
In the years following the transplant, I felt frequent tugs to write about our family’s transplant journey—beyond just a summary and a happy ending. The idea intrigued me even more after attending my first Transplant Games of America in Orlando in 2002. This multi-day sports festival celebrated the transplant community while generating funds and building awareness. Snippets of people’s stories filled my heart, especially as I walked through the Hall of Quilts, where candles flickered and quilt squares represented the lives of donors no longer living.
After attending a few more Transplant Games—and working for a stretch at the Georgia Transplant Foundation—I felt almost called to write about organ donation and transplant. For my master’s project, I created a proposal for a book of individual stories about people’s unique experiences along the road toward donation. Sadly, writing the book itself got sidelined. As often happens, life got in the way.
I didn’t think much about that project again until fall 2021, when my daughter-in-law Lauren called to say her sister Kristen needed a kidney transplant. She wondered if she and her mom Jane could hear more about our family’s transplant story, ask questions, and make some sense out of all the unknowns. While Kristen’s story of renal failure differed from Lisa’s, the bottom lines remained the same: Kristen’s family wanted to get this strange party underway. They wanted to see her well and living a quality life once again.
They got their wish that December, when Kristen received a kidney from Lauren at the AdventHealth Transplant Institute in Orlando. Another happy ending. Hearts filled again.
Jane reminded me recently of a conversation we had back then, when she asked how our mother handled having two daughters undergo surgery at once. She told me, “I expected you to say, with the help of faith and prayer. But you didn’t. You looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Not well.’”
I opened my mouth to apologize for being so blunt, but Jane stopped me. “My sisters and I got a bit of a chuckle out of that. But it was exactly what I needed to hear.”
The truth is, life is hard and holds no guarantees. We don’t always know why things happen, and we certainly can’t control outcomes. But we can cling tightly to faith and hope. And we can advocate for the things we believe in.
That said, I’d like to share one last thing, a quote credited to Maxie Scully, for anyone who might be ready or needing to hear it: “Don’t take your organs to heaven; heaven knows, we need them here.”
You can register to be an organ, eye, and tissue donor by visiting the National Donate Life Registry. Google it. And thanks for your consideration.
Cheers ~ J
