Road trippin’
For the last two weeks, our little Beck family has travelled through South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Montana. A lot of states and a lot of hours in the car together. It’s really been two types of trips–a “one-big-grandparents-and-cousins-on-both-sides-of-the-family” kind of trip and a “little nuclear family” trip.
A decent part of the trip been a J, W, Steve, and Sarah. The total hour of time spent in the car tallied up to around 32 hours. That’s a decent chunk of confined family time. Everyone asked us how the “road trip” time together went. My kids have always been great road trippers. W always finds something to occupy her time in the backseat (crazy to say but it doesn’t ever include watching movies), while J gets ecstatic over pouring over the road maps and tracking miles and distance and highway exits. To be honest, I’m the one who gets cranky during road trips. I hate driving any stretch of the trip more than 3 hours at a time. I’m always too hot and always have books and work that I have full intentions on reading and doing during the trip and never get to, so my legs are cramped with stacks of books and my messenger bag and food and water bottles. I’m the person in the car who hears “only 3 more hours to go” and has an internal mini meltdown because I just want to be there already.
We’ve never driven to Colorado or Utah before, so we decided to head south through all the places we always talk about going to but STILL after almost 9 years of living in Fargo haven’t gotten to seeing yet. We drove through South Dakota and camped overnight in the Badlands. I’ve seen my share of “desert hoodoos and coulees” before—both in Southern Alberta, and the edge of Montana/North Dakota, but I will say, the Badlands in South Dakota are pretty spectacular.
Going into this trip I should have anticipated the drama that always happens during a family vacation. The last road trip we did was to Banff and Jasper National Park in Alberta a few years ago, and there were points where we really struggled with J’s behavior because of the non-existent routine and predictability along the way (we camped or hoteled in a different place every night). The last person I expected to have a wrench thrown into the trip would be me.
Somehow, the essential pink bag filled with my contact lens solution, antibiotics (yes, that makes 3 times in two months with strep), and a ton of other essential things didn’t make it into the Prius. Luckily, none of the essential items were J’s essential items. They just happened to all be mine. And somehow we managed to find contact lens solution at a gas station in Interior near the Badlands and I was able to contact my doctor while on a hike at Mount Rushmore to send the rest of my prescription to Fort Collins. Thank goodness for cell phones!
It really amazes me how J changes over the years. For me, things in J can be really difficult to see sometimes. I’m always so close to the crisis that it’s hard for me to see the nuances along the way. But at the Badlands during the night parks presentation he answered spontaneously a question from the ranger during the night presentation. He recognized the different layers of atmosphere when they were mentioned (this was when he attended that really short time in science at the beginning of the year before we decided to pull him and home school him during that time) during that presentation. He even climbed down from the top of a Badland butte on a hanging rope ladder (OT skills for the win! I don’t have a picture of him doing it, but I do have a video of him doing it on my Instagram). It’s these things that remind me and encourage me to keep doing the things we’re doing, to know that he DOES pick up things while he’s in the mainstream classroom even though we’re not sure he is, that all those years of OT have started to pay off, that he is really maturing even though it NEVER felt that way during middle school, is a good reminder to me that he is progressing and we do need to do these things as family, even though they can be hard and a ton of work.
I think one of the favourite parts of the trip for me was the time we spent this trip as a just the Beck family. Yes, we did enjoy being with extended family—and that was a different experience I’ll get to in next week’s post—it really is a bittersweet thing to be with family when your family has the autism and none of the other grandkids does.
I posted last week about how our family is like this band of brothers—this little team of people who goes through these extraordinary experiences nobody else quite understands. I think this is why this was one of my favourite parts of the trip. It was just us. Having a good time. And I really like those times together.
