The Reader Travels

I can only remember one big road trip with my family where we actually went west of Texas. I was sixteen, and my father had a convention in Colorado Springs. We took an extra week to visit family in Wyoming, saw Yellowstone National Park and some real live mountains.  We took some trips to San Antonio, Dallas and Austin from our home outside of Galveston. We even took a very memorable trip across the Red River into Oklahoma.

But most of the big trips were eastward bound, getting back to family we’d left behind in New Orleans, heading to Florida to see my uncle outside of Pensacola, and even one trip all the way to Orlando for the tell-tale trip to Disney magic. I-10 was a very familiar road to me, and I would enumerate the towns along the way.

• We’d pick up I-10 in Baytown outside of Houston, never touching the monster city.
• Nacogdoches is next. Signs for Beaumont, Port Arthur and Vidor signal that Louisiana is near. Orange is the last town before we cross the Sabine River.
• Lake Charles is the first big town on the Louisiana side, then Lafayette where I loved the Cajun accents of the men who sold us gas and snacks for the road. I can still smell the boudin.
• Crossing the Atchafalaya is the most beautiful part of the trip, and I would stare out the window in awe the whole way.
• Baton Rouge signals that New Orleans won’t be far now.
• NOLA might have been the destination with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and other extended family. Or we might have just stopped there along the way, or detoured along I-12, waving as we passed Lake Pontchartrain with plans to stop on our return.
• Mississippi and Alabama make up skinny swatches of land at this point in the map. Each state dips a thin toe down into the Gulf of Mexico, fighting for coastal entryways with Louisiana and the Florida pan-handle.
• Mobile, Alabama, is a signal that we’re almost to Florida, but it has charms all its own. It’s the closest we’ve been to the sea since we entered the first I-10 on-ramp in Texas, with Mobile Bay connecting us to the Gulf. It feels like we’re driving right into her as we enter the tunnel.
• My uncle is there on the other side, at Eglin AFB near Pensacola, along with my cousins. We stay for a while, but the road calls us back, back to count the mile markers in the opposite direction.

Larry McMurtry compares the Interstates to rivers, but I’m seeing I-10 as some other kind of waterway, an umbilical cord connecting a child to its motherland.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under road tripping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.