Anticipating, and Reminiscing, "The Road Trip"

Ahhh, the smug satisfaction of planning a road trip. Yes, in this age of flight, with all of its conveniences and adornments -- cramped seats, overbooked flights, TSA agents who habitually steal your hairspray from your carry-on bag so you can't build a bomb with it. Not to mention the occasional fuselage-turned-prison-on-the-tarmac with no air-conditioning and emotionally fragile emergency-slide-happy flight attendants. To you, air travel, I bid a fond adieu, as I take to the open road in my gas-guzzling GMC Yukon to participate in one of America's grandest traditions -- The Road Trip. I don't care if Oprah and Gayle drove a Chevy sedan on their road trip. I'd take a smaller car, but we totaled that one a few years back. I take to the road with the full knowledge that 30,000 people a year are killed on America's highways. That's 30,000 more than are killed on airplanes. With statistics like that, I'm thinking the closer your car is to the size of a passenger jet, the safer you are.
The last time my husband and I went on a road trip was nine years ago. It was two days after 9-11, and the first stop on our itinerary was Canada. While the US was awash in grief , we puttered through the provinces of Ontario and Quebec with heavy hearts, noting along the way, sadly, that not one American flag flew in America's support. I had taped an American flag in my windshield before we left on our trip and was quite shocked that the citizens of our neighboring country didn't come running up to me in droves to give me a big hug and tearfully express their sympathy for my country's loss. Our horrific terrorist attack was never acknowledged to us in any way by Canadian citizens during the four days we spent there. However, the reports of the 9-11 attack were in all the papers, and in one lengthy newspaper article it was acknowledged that if Canada were to suffer a similar attack, it would be hard pressed to defend itself. In a diagram comparing numbers of naval ships each country had in its military arsenal, it clearly showed that the United States had many times the defense power than Canada did, and that Canada, more than likely, would be at the mercy of the United States' goodwill to offer military defense.
My husband had warned me before our trip that the "Canucks" didn't like Americans much. I waved him off. "Well maybe it's because we call them "Canucks," I said.
And then came the morning we checked out of our Inn in Quebec. We stood behind a couple who were obviously natives of Canada. The lady at the desk was chatting it up with them, giggling. "Well, we do love our queen," she gushed. She then offered the couple a coupon for something or another. After their seemingly endless checkout, our turn came. The woman suddenly seemed to turn to ice. She hastily took our charge card, hardly looking up the entire time. And, I noticed, we got no offer of a coupon.
As we finally crossed the border into New York, waving off in the distance we spied the biggest American flag we had ever seen. Our flag never looked so good to me. We had come back home to our grieving country, from another where nobody seemed to care. It was one of the strangest and loneliest four days I had ever experienced.
And, so, these are the things you don't experience from an airplane. You travel to learn. You learn the differences between cultures and peoples in other parts of the earth. You learn of people's kindnesses and compassions and, conversely, the lack thereof. You learn of people's prejudices. You don't need anyone to tell you what a place is like after you've traveled there.
My windshield flag eventually faded and I took it down. Just as well. Our upcoming road trip to New England will include another jaunt over the Canadian border to visit Niagara Falls. God willing, we won't be driving there with broken hearts this time.
But, I will be driving. And, oh, Canada, I'll be close enough to terra firma to hug a Canuck!