My road trip this week with my grandson, Wolf, was something I haven't done for a long, long time. A trip like that would reminded even a crotchety old fart like me why people take trips with other people.
I used to take a couple of trips a year with one of my girls, when they were teenagers. We used to pick a direction, sometimes even a destination, and ride up the coast of California together. Every one of those trips is burned into my memory among the best moments of my life. It's a personal flaw that I can't do much with, but traveling with more than one other person is nothing but draining for me. Our family did some trips all together, but not many. It might have been just me, but it always seemed like we ended up more stressed from our vacations than we were when we left. But traveling with one of my family members was always fun.
Traveling the back roads of Minnesota and Wisconsin with Wolf was a throwback to those good old days. We saw and did things I wouldn't have done on my own. We stopped more often, we stayed longer, and I enjoyed myself more than I ever do traveling on my own.
There was a period, between 1996 and 2006 when I hardly went anywhere on my motorcycle during the summers. Wolfe was the reason. Nothing I could ever do on my own would be as cool as the stuff I could do with my grandson. We hung out almost every weekend for 8 years and most weekends for the following two years. As he gets older, he's less interested in being slowed down by an old guy, so I've gone back on the road for bits of my summers. If I'm not with my kids, I'd just as soon be alone. So there you have a reason why I'm a solo tourist.
For a while, I'm going to have the best of both worlds, motorcycling places and doing it with my grandson. It's hard to top that for as long as it lasts.
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