The Middle Roads: Prologue

Middle Roads:
Our Spring Break Road Trip

[This account will be published as a "serial" with one chapter published a week until it's done or until I lose interest and no one reminds me.]

This is the trip that Jon and I had been talking about since we decided we would not go to Florida for spring break. This is also the trip we took when we realized that riding motorcycles to California was not practical. Eventually we realized that perhaps California was out of the question all together, and so that trip receded into dream and this trip became reality. Because we needed a trip. All our friends would be somewhere south in a condo, spending the days in a house or on a beach, and the two of us wanted instead to travel. We eventually decided that Jon would come home with me for the first weekend of spring break, and we would use the week to make our way to his house in Georgia, stopping to see friends along the way.

Our idea was to meander through pieces of the country we had never seen before. We imagined the highways lying like a vast web across the country, linking city to city with pavement. These were what we called the High Roads, the roads that we always drove to get us to school and back. These would not be good enough for this road trip, because we felt you could never see enough of the country from them. They hung over the lands aloof.

We were looking for the Middle Roads, the Old Roads. We wanted the highways that people used before there were expressways, the roads that actually tied the towns together by winding through them. We imagined these roads stringing small, forgotten towns together like pearls on a chain, stretching all the way through the Midwest, revealing country churches and tiny shops and all the things people miss by driving the interstate. These were what we would travel on our road trip. We called them the Middle Roads to distinguish them from the back-roads of gravel and dirt like the one I lived on that we called Low Roads.