Hit The Road
I’ve been going on road trips for years. I used to go on necessary road trips to get home to family in the summer time. With three little boys. In a full-size GMC van. I called it Lori’s Chuckwagon.
Those trips weren’t a lot of fun and were taken strictly to get from point A to point B.
Years later, I began taking vacations with friends, and we opted to drive rather than take the pricier option of flying. Rhonda was my first road trip partner. She and I have taken many road adventures together. You can read about a very special one in my book, The Charm.
Over time, Rhonda and I have taken along a variety of others on our junkets and have had a blast exploring cities, beaches, parkways and mountain ranges together. Each trip, regardless of the people along for the ride or the place we explored were fun in their own way.
Back then, I used to love spending weeks planning each day’s drive, stops along the way, places to stay overnight and sites to tour. I spent hours with maps and searching the web in advance creating detailed itineraries. The last carefully planned and detailed road trip was in 2019 with Rhonda and Kim. We toured Massachusetts, Maine, Quebec City, Vermont and New Hampshire.
Then COVID-19 happened. And we couldn’t take our annual road trip. Since that time, Rhonda has been a little side-lined caring for family members, but Kim and I have continued taking trips at least annually. In 2021, the first year that we felt it was safe to travel, we couldn’t decide where to go. Instead of advanced planning, we thought it might be fun to choose a starting point and let chance lead us on our journey. But how? Throw a dart at a map? We felt sure that taking a map and throwing darts at it would be frowned upon by the hotels in which we stayed. Pick a name out of a hat? That would require making choices about possible destinations – and that required conscious decision - not the random feature we wanted. Spin a directional arrow? That took care of direction, but not distance to travel. Those options didn’t provide just what we needed to guide us on an uncharted tour. We needed a better solution – one that would define the direction to take and how far to take it. For two people who feel comfy and safe with daily routines, this seemed slightly frightening, but potentially a fresh and exciting way to spend a week of vacation time.
One Friday night in the spring of 2019 while sitting on my back porch and sipping wine, we came up with a method that we wanted to try. Remember those old paper-folded fortune tellers from your childhood? The ones that contained the names of prospective husbands and would conjure up the boy that you would marry? Surely that could be useful now (it wasn’t then and had the husband predications ALL wrong). We decided that one of those little paper toys could predict something more useful than a husband – our direction and distance each day of our road trip. We believed that we had the perfect solution – an inexpensive gadget that could point us in a completely random direction each day!
Random? Definitely. Define distance and direction? Surely we could figure out how to make that work. Crazy? My husband told us that it was – and maybe he was a little right. Impromptu? Absolutely. We tried it anyway. And that is how ImprompTour began.