The next blog challenge prompt is to tell about your favorite travel destination.

As I said in the last post, I don’t travel much. I can count the number of vacations I have taken on both hands and probably have fingers left over. And as I thought back in regards to this prompt, I realized I remember the journeys more than the destinations.

I remember our family driving from Kansas to Arkansas to visit my grandad when I was a little tot. Jon was alive and well enough to travel, so I was older than 2. Grandad and Grandma Lila still lived in Arkansas, so it was before I turned 8, because when I was 8, we drove to Oregon to visit them. I think we traveled to Arkansas in my dad’s pickup, because we were all in one bench seat. If Jon or I got tired, we curled up on the passenger floorboard on a blanket next to the heater and took a nap. Right before we got to Arkansas, I caused a minor crisis when I wrapped my mom’s hair scarf around my finger so tight it turned purple and the knots were so tight my mom didn’t think she was going to get it off in time to get circulation back in my finger–she did and all was well. By the time we finally found the mountain that my grandad lived on, it was pitch black and raining heavily. We didn’t know which cabin was his, so we would drive a little ways up the old dirt path through the trees and stop at a cabin and Mom would hop out and run to the door. She’d hop back in and say “Well, that was Uncle James–we have to keep going.” Hopped in at the next one with “Found Uncle Roy–he says to go up 2 more.” We kept chugging up the mountain until we reached the summit where grandad’s cabin was located. We ran through the pooling water to get to the porch. The cabin was gorgeous–it was all beautiful, carved wood inside with a large stone fireplace.

Our next big trip was to Oregon. We drove up through Nebraska and the Dakotas and stopped at Mt. Rushmore and Reptile Gardens. We pulled a little camper trailer behind the truck that time and stayed at campgrounds. Jon and I shared the top bunkbed. One morning I woke up to a sound that was exactly like the scraping of a huge tortoise shell on the ground that I had heard at Reptile Gardens. I was terrified as I leaned over the edge of the bed and looked down. It was Jon dragging a suitcase across the floor. We drove through Yellowstone Park and Idaho. I don’t remember much about Oregon except that I fell in love with the rainy drizzle and overcast skies. We got in trouble for throwing a ball over the hedge into a neighbor’s yard and our uncle had to take us around the block to ask for our ball back. Went to the Pacific Ocean and saw that people had drawn a naked lady in the wet sand. Met a new cousin that was so brand new that she still had her umbilical cord stump. We drove back home through Utah and Colorado–it was pretty uneventful, since I have never been too impressed by the Rockies.

When I was a couple years older, my granny and new grandpa Jim loaded the grandkids up in their RV and took us to Missouri for a couple days. We drove through the drive-through zoo near Springfield, and Granny tried to feed Doritos chips to a llama from the door of the RV as we all crowded around and watched. At one picnic spot, I found a couple shark teeth in the dirt and learned that the midwest was once ocean.

In 2000 or 2001, we piled into Grandpa Jim’s conversion van and road through the drive-through zoo again on our way to Arkansas to visit family. My sons got to experience a herd of bison surrounding the van and pressing up against it and rocking it back and forth as they passed by. When we got to Arkansas, Uncle Roy let them ride with him on the 4-wheeler.

In 2002, my sons and I had our first experience with flying when we went to Oregon to visit Grandad (I don’t really count the emergency plane trip to Wichita to try to keep one of them from being born too early). My stepson got lost in the Denver terminal when he wandered off to the bathroom alone and my dad found him and hauled him back. Our youngest son was the only one to get physically searched when he touched the metal detector as he walked through, and his suitcase was searched because the nebulizer machine looked like an ominous black rectangle in the suitcase. We took them to the Pacific Ocean and my husband had to swoop in and grab the youngest son before he stepped on a jellyfish on the beach. The trip home was much less eventful.

In 2010, we took a whirlwind 3 day weekend trip to Missouri. The family asked that I never cram that much into that few days again, but I didn’t want to deal with 4 kids having too much down time between activities. So we did the drive-through zoo by Springfield and the youngest son will forever hate Clyde the Camel for assaulting him through a bus window. We stopped at the Laura Ingalls Wilder home and gravesite. We went to Branson and got some great photos at the wax museum. We took a very relaxing 3 hour cruise on a train. We waited for an hour in the heat until AAA got there to retrieve the keys in the locked van. We saw the dancing water fountain show. And on the way home, we went to Worlds of Fun and got caricatures drawn of the kids that I will forever love.

So yeah, not much traveling has been done by me. But I love the journeys I have taken, because the company has always been the best part of every trip. I have gotten to spend days with my favorite people, and that has made every trip my favorite. I hope we can take a couple more trips before I can’t travel anymore.