QOTW: Most Memorable Roadtrip

This is Ruth typing. Lori asks about memorable roadtrips.

In 1971 I was 12. Dad and Mom piled all 7 of us kids into the station wagon and hauled us and a Scamper Camper (popup) from Detroit to Washington DC, our first big trip as a family.
Mom gave each of us a notepad to draw/write things in, about the trip-- this is the first sketchjournal I remember getting.
I didn't take it seriously. I wrote a few sentences, drew a couple things, and fought with my siblings instead of concentrating on the notepad.
We saw wondrous things.
I loved the Smithsonian, especially the amazing dollhouses and jewelry.
Loved the wax museum, the various monuments and memorials. We took side trips to Pennsylvania -- Hershey (loved the chocolate kiss streetlights), Amish country (Bird-In-Hand -- I loved the apparent peace and history) and Philadelphia (loved-loved-loved seeing the house where Lincoln was treated before he died, Independence Hall,
the Liberty Bell,The Betsy Ross house, Christ Church, and the burial sites of many early patriots including our great-great-many-greats uncle, Robert Morris, who signed the Declaration of Independence and helped finance the Revolutionary War).
Lovely trip, loved it all, the history and culture.
Lots of photos which Mom snapped. Very sparse art/journaling from me.

Later that year Dad died suddenly.
I deeply regretted not having more of a record of what he meant to me, personally. Mom remarried and life changed. Two years later my art teacher pulled me out of class one day to give me a blank book to record my perceptions of life in. Somehow she recognized I was a very troubled 15-year-old, though I sure didn't tell anyone what was going on at our house.
Ever since then I have sketch-journaled, not every day, but most of the important stuff, and certainly all of our roadtrips.
I believe it saved my life.

I want to go back to Washington DC, introducing my own family to its wonders. Maybe next summer. Of course I will sketchjournal it.

Debbie's Mysterious Roadtrip

Writer Brainers' current Question of the Week is about memorable roadtrips, so I thought I'd weigh in on the topic. But rather than offering up one from my distant past, here's a trip of more recent vintage, fresh from the mental scrapbook of my family's vacation last week in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

We stayed in the Manistique area at an extraordinarily lovely cabin, and over the course of a week spent plenty of time on the beach. We also took some fun if slightly de rigueur sidetrips to Big Springs, Seul Choix Lighthouse, and Fayette Ghost Town. Many pictures were taken. Much fun was had. Good memories, all of them.

But we also made one sidetrip of a very different nature. We went to.... The Mystery Spot.

Why, you may ask? Why would a family with common sense coursing through its collective veins voluntarily pay an expensive visit to a known tourist trap that is based on nothing more than optical illusions and vestibular disorientation? What an odd thing for her to say! It's downright... mysterious!

To understand the rationale behind our irrationality, let me take you back in time for a moment, to my and my husband's childhoods. (Bring your duster -- you'll need it for the cobwebs.) Though he and I didn't know one another then, we likely passed one another on the highway, as both of us made regular trips with our families to the U.P.

Those trips exposed us to those intriguing Mystery Spot road signs: those bright black, red, yellow and white signs dominated by a Giant Question Mark. Oh, those billboards were irresistible! I longed to go to the Mystery Spot. As I've written about previously (in my 9/16/7 entry on my News page) this desire ranked right up there with my fantasy of driving in to a truck weigh station. (Bear in mind when considering these somewhat odd childhood dreams that I spent most of my long car trips of yore stuck in the middle of the back seat, doped up on Dramamine....)

My parents were (and still are) good and smart people who knew full well that (if I can say this without being sued by the Mystery Spot people) a visit to the Mystery Spot would be a waste of time and money. I, and the world at large, know this to be the case. But knowledge was no match for my and my husband's combined 87 years of Mystery Spot curiosity. So when our children expressed their own strong interest in going (OK, well, it was really just a case of "Mom, what's the Mystery Spot?" -- but add thirty or forty years, I'm sure they'd be hankering to go), we figured it was time to pay a visit.

Needless to say, we were underwhelmed. Admission was even more than we suspected it might be, and we had to wait a while for our "tour" to begin, not an easy task with two trip-weary kids. Once "in" the Mystery Spot, our younger son found the tilt and slant of the Mystery Spot building to be so disturbing that he could barely stand to be in it (to an extent that I had to chase him down and demand that he Get Back In Here and Enjoy The Mystery Spot, Now!). Our elder son, an engineer in the making, held up his hand at nearly every opportunity to point out how the principles of physics were being utilized. Still, by the end, we all got into the spirit of doing such a ridiculous thing, and we were laughing happily -- if only at ourselves.

And thus are roadtrip memories made.

But one mystery remains. The brochure for the Mystery Spot invites visitors to "See for yourself why most of our one million visitors return year after year." Say it ain't so. People go back???????