Yes, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a road trip book.  It’s all about a father and his son on their motorcycle, riding from the lakes of Minnesota to the mountains in North Dakota, to the red woods in California. But I’ll warn you now, if you ever intend to read it, it’s very thin on plot, so you shouldn’t expect a page turner.

The fact is, this journey is not for everyone. Most people who pick it up make it through the first 75 pages or less and then decide they can’t take any more of the trip. I admit, I sometimes had to force myself to turn the pages, but I was glad I made it to the end.

It was kinda like my very first vacation as a married person. We didn’t have a lot of money, so driving was really the only option. Unlike our zen friends, our problem was that we had too much plot in a one week span, but we probably should have packed up and headed home just for our sanity.

We first drove from Dallas to Atlanta to visit a friend who lived in a nice house in the suburbs with his parents and kid sister. We went to a big music festival, several movies and even took a day trip to Chattanooga to see the aquarium.

We came home by way of New Orleans, staying with family while we were there. We went to a Tulane football game in the Super Dome then visited the French Quarter to watch guys in dog collars and assless chaps for Southern Decadence. We visited my grandmother in a nursing home, her head shaved bald after some brain surgery, delusional, though she recognized me for her last time on that visit.

We took another side trip to Carville, Louisiana, to do some research for a novel, and got a tour of the hospital before they closed it down a year later (they’ve since reopened the facility as a museum). I wasn’t afraid of catching a disease, but the stress of the stigma and the exhaustion of the trip made me want to go home right then.

We were so scarred after that trip, we decided we never again wanted to visit friends or family on our vacations. But like the book, I’m really glad we finished that trip. My life will never be the same.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 2:13 pm 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.