I’M JUST CURIOUS: The experience of a three generation journey

by Debbie Walker

Come to think of it, this has actually been a four generation female journey. The three generations, my daughter, granddaughter and myself, traveled with mom’s car that she left for me this past summer when she died.

Mom’s name was Alice. I named her car Alice. Mom came to me in a dream one night recently and said, “I gave you your wings, now fly little bird.” The trip was on!

To add to our little adventure into warmer weather, we drove into a snowstorm in Virginia! We were lucky to have our friend, Steve, monitoring the storm and what was going on ahead of us on the entire trip.

Once there, before coming to our room, my granddaughter looked out a third story window onto the parking lot below. There was a vehicle on which someone had written the name “ALICE” in the three inches of snow on the car. Okay, mom is definitely making the journey with us and wants us to know!

Virginia slowed us down with some nasty driving. My daughter has only driven on snow and ice for one week on an earlier vacation, years ago. My granddaughter, Florida born, has zero exposure to life with snow. They were both troopers, especially one stop light where the vehicles did a little slide before stopping.

That night in the hotel, I thought we might be asked to leave the premises. There were some seriously loud bouts of laughing coming from our room. Do you know what happens when three women, after hours and hours of driving on unfamiliar roads and streets, settle in for the night? It seems we can and did get pretty crazy! The two younger generations decided they would do facial masks of clay or whatever. There may be situations in which these things could be done without hysterical laughter, however, that was not the case with our aching bodies. Of course, when they took distorted pictures of the activity and sent them to various friends and loved ones it just added yet another laughing session!

I forgot to tell you about my daughter “losing” me in a totally unfamiliar city, in a snowstorm. She and my granddaughter were the lead vehicle as I followed, they had the GPS. The lead made it through a light and I got caught. Quickly she realized she left me behind. My granddaughter says her mother had a “meltdown!” All panicky because to her I was lost. So funny. Needless to say we reconnected with very little effort.

The next morning we waited until daylight to leave because of the snowstorm. After all the hoopla about the dreaded snowstorm it really wasn’t that bad. Maybe the attitude is a little different when the driver is from Maine rather than Virginia!

We did make it to Florida just fine. It was a bit rainy but we crossed that state line and I was a happy woman! Today it was in the 70s and sunny and I enjoyed every second of it.

I am just curious what sort of journey you have been on. I’d love to hear. Contact me at dwdaffy@yahoo.com. Thanks for reading!