Megan Stielstra's Blog

So we needed a vacation. In a big way.

(probably everyone reading this right now is thinking the same thing)

We needed OUT of the city, AWAY from the “Be Here, Do This, Hurry Up! You’re Late! Read That, Edit This, Build That Site, Make These Changes, Let me check my iCalendar! etc.” so what we did was book tickets to Texas where we’d spend a few days with Christopher’s family, visit our friends in Austin and then shoot down to the Gulf of Mexico for a little R&R that would include the following:

Laying in sand
Reading books
Writing in the journal
Sleeping in
Drinking frothy things in the sunshine
Seeing movies
Wandering around without having to be anywhere
Sleeping in
Sleeping in

Our flight was scheduled for SUNDAY morning. SATURDAY morning, as we drank coffee, we were planning out What We Had to Do Still: run errands, drop off Mojo, pack, 2nd Story, call cab for airport, etc. and in the middle of it all Christopher said, “Do you remember the last time we did anything SLOWLY?”

I had to think about that one. Then: “Prague,” I said, where we lived over TWO YEARS AGO and that, I thought, was really sad. That it had been TWO YEARS since we moved slowly and by that I mean taking your time between point A and point B—hell, who cares if it takes a couple hours or days or week to get to B so long as you’re enjoying yourself along the way? “But isn’t that why we’re going on vacation?” I asked. “To slow down? To slam on the breaks and then ease into a calmer pace once we get home?”

“Yes,” he said—and, FYI, while we’re having this conversation about slowing down, Christopher is cleaning the printer that we just sold on Craigslist and I’m organizing the piles of student work I have yet to read and our house is a mess and there are stacks of laundry everywhere and the dog is asking to go outside and it’s seven a.m. on a Saturday and why are we up this early? Anyone? Bueller?—“BUT,” he went on, “We’re already freaking out about how we’ll get to the airport and will we make it there on time and all this rushing rushing rushing and—”

Long story short: we canceled our flight and drove it. Yaaaay ROAD TRIP! Bad food, Big Gulps, slow and leisurely, get out when we want to (JESSE JAMES WAX MUSEUM!!) and remember how much bigger the world is than our little corner of the city.

We left at four a.m. (FYI: I’d been at 2nd Story the night before until midnight, so when I say “left at four a.m.” what I really mean is Christopher making me get up, me bitching up a storm, me picking up my pillow and blanket, going outside, into the backseat of the car and falling right back to sleep). I woke up in the middle of Missouri, a state which—so far as I could tell as it whizzed past on 44 W—goes like this: beautiful beautiful beautiful green green strip maaaaaaaall green green beautiful adult video store green green strip mall green (Oklahoma is similar. Except with more adult video stores).

Topics of conversation during the twelve-hour drive:

1. Finances

2. Family (re: Christopher quizzing me on who I was about to meet and how they’re related to whom)

3. Politics (re: when can we discuss politics with our family? and also how do they affect our finances?)

4. Politics (re: education, property taxes and where do our taxes go? and should we be pissed that they’re going so many places we DON’T want them to go? or just suck it up ‘cause lots of them go where we DO want them to go? and there’s many people in this country who DON’T want them to go where we DO want them to go and we expect THEM to suck it up. and vice versa. and also Obama)

5. Politics (re: the entirety of this country is MUCH different then just Chicago)

6. Politics (re: the This American Life episode “Godless America” about the separation of church and state [Christopher burned ten episodes of This American Life for the drive, which was so awesome because A. I love This American Life and B. to be trapped in a car for twelve hours can be murder—especially if you’re like me and can’t read in the car (headaches) or didn’t plan enough ahead to go to the library and get audio books—so it’s great to have something that gets your brain moving, like we listened to this episode called “Superpowers” which Oh My Gosh was so good, I mean, they’re all good, but this particular one just about killed me: it featured a REAL LIFE superwoman named Zora who, when she was a kid, made a list of all the skills she’d need to master in order to be a superhero (martial arts, hang-gliding, weapons, etc.) and she DID them all and now she’s a bounty hunter, how badass is THAT? And also it interviewed all these people about the whole Flying vrs. Invisibility thing])

7. Which would you prefer: to fly or be invisible? (C. and I both say Flying. Although the woman who said she’d be invisible to steal cashmere sweaters from Barneys is near to my heart)

8. Flowers. Christopher is trying to teach me: “The pink ones are called Indian Paintbrushes,” he says. “The grass is called Johnson Grass. The purple ones are Mexican Turks Caps … Turkscaps … or maybe they’re not Mexican, I can’t remember. The clumps low to the ground are Milkweed and you break off a leaf and this goo comes out that looks sorta like Elmer’s Glue and what you do is put the goo in a girl’s hair and then she has to marry you but sometimes she punches you in the face and that’s the beginning of true love.” (pause) “I’ll give you a demonstration later.” (pause) “Except you can’t punch me in the face.” (pause) “Because we’re already married.”

9. Dinner parties we’d like to have

10. How I need to write in my journal more ‘cause it makes me a better writer and reader and human and wife (re: less manic)

11. The Alphabet Game (in case you’ve lived your entire life in a barn [although I’d expect people who lived in barns would even know this game] The Alphabet Game is when you call out letters in alphabetical order off billboards and street signs and race to see who can reach Z first. There are many variations on this game depending on how long the trip is: forwards A to Z, backwards Z to A, forwards double letters [AA, BB, CC etc.] etc. Christopher and I play this all the time on trips to Michigan and were gearing up for some incredibly complex maneuverings on the way to Texas: odd letters down and even letters back up, every fifth letter, every letter MUST be the second letter in the word on the billboard—but what happened was we started somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma, both of us called out our A’s! and then we didn’t see another letter/word/sign/ANYTHING for nearly thirty miles and by that point we’d given up)

12. Poop (I’m not sure how this started, but people. Seriously. If you’re locked in a car for over ten hours—stopping only for gas, bathroom or beef jerky [Christopher. Not me]—you cannot be held responsible for the direction of conversation.

(this photo is blurry 'cause my footprints are all over the windshield from when I fell asleep with my feet on the dashboard)

(I made Christopher pull over so I could take pictures of these tall people, and a guy in the barn started yelling something at me which, being from Chicago, I assumed was something about Get the Hell Off His Property, but it turns out he was just asking if I wanted him to take a picture of me with the really tall people. Strangers are kind here in Texas, even strangers on whose property you are loitering while you photograph their lawn)