Some would say that dragging my 79-year-old terminally ill mother on a road trip, totaling 3,781 miles in 16 days across 11 states, was a bad idea. But here’s the thing…
It was her idea.
When I decided to provide my mother with one last great vacation, I asked her to answer three questions:
Q1: International or domestic?
Cruise ship naturally came as an early choice due to ease of travel for someone with limited mobility. My mom broke her hip some years before and now has trouble walking long distances. But she also has anemia and immunosuppression due to blood cancer (MDS). Cruise ships can be disease farms.
As much as she wanted to go to Europe (Ireland) or some far flung island in the pacific (Hawaii), if anything were to go wrong medically, we were much better off remaining in the lower 48 where I could just make a U-turn and go home.
A1: Domestic
Q2: Do you want to go somewhere new, somewhere you have always wanted to go yet never had the chance? Or do you what to go places you’ve visited in years past for some nostalgia?
“Well, I don’t know!” was her answer. She wanted to go to Crater lake in Oregon (new). She wanted to go to Montreal to visit the cathedral (old). She wanted to go to Charleston to visit Fort Sumter which she missed last visit (old). She wanted to visit historical sites in Texas (new).
A strong idea came back to visit Amish country in Pennsylvania, something she’d seen a lot of on TV. It took a few conversations to really help mom understand that this was very likely the last big trip she would take in her life. I wasn’t subtle.
“Mom, do you really want your last road trip to be a visit with weird religious luddites?”
“Well, no… let’s go Southeast to Pensacola and Charleston.”
“And Savannah. I’ve never been. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”
“And Savannah.”
A2: Nostalgia tour
Q3: Do you want to travel and stay in one place or do the usual ‘Mounts Family Vacation’ where we jam in as much activity as possible?
I don’t even know why I asked other than as I have gotten older, I have come to appreciate slowing down while I am not at work. But my mom’s retired life is slow all the time, so she wanted to speed it up a little. There is just so much to see and do in the world and never enough time to take it all in.
She wanted it all. I accommodated.
A3: Two weeks of insane travel with the buffer of a four-day July 4th weekend for me to be a slug and recover.
And so, on June 14th, I set out to Peoria, Illinois to visit my family and strap mom into my Chevy Spark ‘Lorraine’ for the long haul. Our route took us south to Nashville, TN; Birmingham, AL; Pensacola, FL; Jacksonville, FL; Savannah, GA; Charleston, SC; Asheville, NC; and Columbia, IN. I dropped mom back home and made my final destination of Minneapolis, MN on June 29th.
The ‘dogs’ of the trip included a hotel in Jacksonville that smelled of wet cigar ashtray; an overbuilt tourist trap blocking the view of the Atlantic; a harrowing drive across South Carolina where the interstate needs to be six lanes but is only four; and the free Georgia state map that mom found so disagreeable, she complained about it for three days.
But the rest was wonderous with surprises and small blessings. And mom was a trooper. We were not able to do as much physical activity as I would have liked but we went on a lot of tours and got to see what we wanted- by trolley, by boat, by horse driven carriage. And for the activities that I wanted to do but mom could not, she encouraged me to go anyway and sat with a crossword puzzle as I made the treks without her. Good mom.
I took about 2,000 photos as is my habit and will post the highlights of this adventure in the coming weeks. I hope some of the joy we experienced while making this journey reaches you through these travel logs.
-Copyright C.M. Mounts, July 2019
