Play It Again, Hamster

Last summer, before the Hamster and I embarked on our five-week, 9,900-mile, coast-to-coast, father-son road trip across this great country, I was both excited and terrified, completely unsure of what to expect and how things would turn out in terms of both logistics and our relationship. If you read this blog, you already know that the trip couldn’t have gone much better in either respect: we saw and did dozens of incredible things, and we became so inseparable that Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn were jealous. “The Adventure Boys,” Sam called us. When it was over, all we wanted to do was hop in the car and start the adventure all over again. Well, sleep in our own beds for a night or two first, and then hop in the car.

This summer, however, Sam is a year older and while he very much wanted to spend the summer exploring the rest of the country with me, he also wanted to spend the summer at sleepaway camp with his friends. Ultimately a compromise was born: he’d do both. Today he got back from a month at camp. On Monday we leave for Road Trip 2, a three-week drive through the southeastern United States that will include Washington, DC, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, in roughly that order.

Of course I’ll be blogging again, and I hope you’ll follow our adventures. I’m still finalizing some of the details but one thing is for sure: this trip will be different from the last in several ways. For one, the weather will likely be both hotter and more humid, a bad combination that will mean less time driving with the top down. There will also be less baseball, due mainly to the lack of Major League teams in the region we’re visiting and in part to the unfortunate tendency of several minor league teams to be playing away games on the days we’ll be in their hometowns. At Sam’s request, we’re also planning to be on the road for his 11th birthday. (In fact he requested that we do something “super road-trippy” on his birthday, whatever that means. As it stands now we’ll probably spend at least part of that day driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains, which is supposedly one of the more scenic drives in the country and thus super road-trippy, at least in my mind.) But the biggest difference is that this time, there’s no trepidation–only excitement. As the great philosopher/tax cheat/biofuel entrepreneur Willie Nelson says, I can’t wait to get on the road again.