Shoestring Sisters: A Travel Memoir of Sorts

(the story of how my sister and I drove from Chicago to LA and back on less than $300 apiece)

by

Emily Mills (2002)

Seeds of Faith (Introduction)

I'd been planning to do this Western road trip for a few years by the time the summer of 2002 rolled around. My best friend and I had done numerous excursions into the vast unknowns of the American Southeast, but we'd neglected that great untamed expanse known as the American West. Unfortunately, said best friend was off traipsing around Europe for the summer, and so I turned to my ever-lovely sister, Heather, as a travel companion. Thankfully, or perhaps she just threw her good judgment to the wind, she agreed to come along. And so, preparations for the journey began.

Of course, when I say preparations, I mean that it was left entirely up to me to plan our course, as my sister is a self-described "flake when it comes to travel plans". I knew right off the bat that this particular trip would need to be done for as little money as possible, as both of us are, shall we say, poor. To start with, I needed information about the lands through which we'd be driving. Luckily, my job as a whore for a giant corporate bookstore finally came in handy, as I was able to peruse various travel books while on break and simply copy the information out of them, rather than actually having to purchase them.

With a rough itinerary (I've always been one who believe that should you want to make God laugh, simply tell Her your plans) and the few camping odds n' ends that I owned, I felt ready. Heather managed to acquire a tent and a cooler, so things were looking up.

Of course, keep in mind that my vehicle, the incredibly stalwart and steady "Shaggin Waggin", was a '91 Ford Aerostar minivan, with a good 150,000 miles already logged on its little engine-that-could. I did a full tune-up before the trip, however, and felt relatively sure (or at least, stubbornly oblivious) that it could make the trip in one piece.

The day of departure loomed large. On the 29^th of July I drove south from Madison to Chicago to meet up with my sister, and then at the very butt-crack o' dawn on the 20^th, we headed out on our grand, if slightly insane, journey to see the country.

The Path Not Taken: Chicago to Oklahoma in One Day

(Day 1)

We left Chicago at approximately 5:30AM and just barely managed to avoid the rush hour traffic. Rush hour in Chicago is truly something that one must do everything in their power to avoid. The van was packed nearly full with supplies and food. We'd hoped to keep things cheap by actually cooking our own food, rather than eating at restaurants. We had our mascot for the trip, a doll of the abominable snowman from the old animated Rudolph Christmas special (you know, with the Island of Misfit Toys and all that), whom we had for some reason dubbed "Biff". In the window, Heather had hung a picture of Sappho (her dog, a chihuahua, not the poet). We felt confident.

The ride south through the very long state of Illinois was mostly uneventful that morning, with the only oddity being the strange brown mist that hovered over and through all of the cities of Bloomington and Normal. Smog, perhaps, and oh-so lovely. And then we saw it, the Gateway to the West, the grand a looming St. Louis Arch. Appropriately enough, as we drove into view of the thing, it peaked out from over a landfill, which we could only assume was the largest land feature in the area (as landfills so often are in the Midwest).

Through Missouri and into Oklahoma, we passed the Mother Jones monument (at which point I indulged in a little history lesson for Heather, who did not know who Mother Jones was) and then, as if to circumvent the significance of that monument, we drove under the world's largest McDonalds, which spanned the interstate in a sort of hyper-commercial presence. Apparently, there's even a Will Rogers museum inside.

Our first real tragedy befell us just outside of Oklahoma City, as Heather forgot about the precariously perched photograph of her dog in the window and opened it. The picture was sucked out and lost forever to the wilderness, much to our dismay. A bad omen? We surely hoped not.

I noticed, as we neared our destination of Ardmore (which is almost exactly at the dead center and dead south of the state and where I was forced to live for the final two years of my high school career), I noticed how incredibly green everything was. If you know Oklahoma, you know that round about August, the vegetation tends to look somewhat burned out (literally). Everything is usually an unpleasant and depressing shade of brown and the temperatures hover in the low 100's daily. This year, however, as we rolled on towards my father's house, all the plants were happily verdant in color and the air felt pleasantly cooler than normal.

And then, around 8PM and after a mere 13 ½ hours on the road (a personal record), we pulled into the driveway of my father and stepmother's ranch house in Ardmore. Ah, at last, free food and glorious, glorious washing machines.

Oh, and we were awfully pleased to see dad, too.