I knew when I saw today's prompt from the Daily Post I knew I had to write to it.
I saw the question about favorite road trips and the cop out would be, "Every road trip is my favorite," and then I felt the hair on the back of my neck take out its red slasher whip and knock me on the forehead with it. One of the first things my writing students hear from me is "be specific". Vague and general and sweeping don't make for very effective reading experiences. I love road tripping. I take driving adventures as often as possible and completely embrace the belief that the road trip is as much or more about the journey than it is about the destination. And that being said, it would be easy to point to the cross country trip I attempted with my children two summers ago that was aborted amidst blown transmissions. I realized when I had the a-ha that while it was transformative and one of the "adventures of this lifetime" it wasn't "the one" for today. I realized that my "favorite" wasn't "every", it was the most recent. My most recent road trip was to the Gold Country with my two younger children. My eldest has since moved on to college on the East Coast. We plan on doing some New England road tripping during Spring break. Two weekends ago the younger children and I set off in search of a young Samuel Clemens, the man who spent the winter of 1864-5 in California's Calaveras County on his way to becoming Mark Twain. When we visit New England in the Fall we plan to visit Mark Twain's home in Hartford, Connecticut, which is right next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe's home. This is where he ended up after fame and fortune found him. In California's Gold Country we would find the young man, the still-on-the-fence-to-success printer-turned-miner-turned-storyteller who would sit with his friends in saloons in Angel's Camp swapping tales and shared a tiny cabin with two other men while the war between the states raged on the other side of the country. We were attempting to find his cabin on Saturday afternoon. We knew it was between Columbia, California and Angel's Camp. I had seen the markers on websites, but they weren't too clear about how to get from the markers to the cabin. I stood by a marker and looked into a deep ravine with nothing but trees in sight. "This isn't it, maybe it is down there? But there aren't any roads...." my voice disappeared but my resolve got stronger. I went back to the tiny settlement called Tuttletown and stepped into a saloon/convenience store to buy water and ask directions. "Oh, yeah. His cabin is up on Jackass Hill Road. Just go on the highway here, it will go up and down and then its a sharp right." I nodded, listening and grateful. The night before we had hung out at the Angel's Camp Mercantile for some family karaoke and we heard his cabin was on a road that looked like "little more than a driveway" so armed with those two details we set out to find this landmark in American Literature. The highway bent and I saw a sign with an arrow proclaiming "Jackass Hill Road" and I saw a driveway like road right at the foot of the sign. I took the sharp turn and we hurtled onto the dirt road, potholed and muddy from all the recent rain.
"I have to drive a mile on this thing? I can't turn back, we've come so far..." I said aloud to myself and my wide-eyed and silent children who knew how stubborn... oh, ummm tenacious their mother is when it comes to anything related to Writers and History.
Our red escort grumbled as we pushed her forward. She lurched in agreement until I found we were not going to get close to one mile driven before the road ended with its destination being - nowhere in particular. I was undeterred. I got out of the car to investigate. I craned my neck at the end of the road. "There isn't a cabin!" I lamented. I walked to the left and found a rather fresh animal skeleton, guessing it was a dog or a coyote.
That creeped me out enough to get back into the car and.. somehow get out. It was one lane. No turn around and the muddy terrain made my heart pound. Considering my status as Mom and defacto leader of this road trip adventure I had to give off the air of being completely confident when actually, I was writing the newspaper article and the eleven o-clock news copy. "A traveling Mom and her two children were found today close to Jackass Hill after somehow botching a sightseeing tour of Mark Twain's cabin... why a mother would foolishly turn on this one lane, muddy road is unknown and given the delirious responses of mom and children, we still don't know..."
More of the story of the Mark Twain Cabin with a full image of the Cabin.
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