Curing Destination Disease

Ever travel with a person stricken by Destination Disease? If you have, you know what it is like. No unnecessary breaks. No avoidable waypoints. No relaxed meals. Just get in the car and drive with bug-eyed determination to your destination. 

Steve Gilliland, a motivational speaker, calls that hammer-down traveling style the Destination Disease. Unfortunately, John and I have been guilty of that, at least to some degree. Grandparents live a day's drive away which means we start driving in the morning and muscle through boredom and travel-weariness by watching mile markers slip by the windows. The sooner we get there, the sooner we can start having fun. This past weekend, though, we decided to take Gilliland's advice and enjoy the ride. 

We broke up an 11-hour drive by stopping at the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia. 

Each house, with exception to the West African replica, comes from the country it represents. The buildings were torn apart in their native homelands, their bricks numbered and marked for correct position and orientation, and the buildings were reassembled at the museum. For my LEGO-loving children, this sounded like the biggest LEGO challenge ever. Each house represented the kinds of homes the early American immigrants would have had (or desired to have) in their homeland. 

English house in the 1600's

One room of the English house

Irish farm from the 1700s

Many of the stops had friendly, informed volunteers who told us about the era and answered our questions.

A German man cooked era-appropriate food in the
German kitchen. He apologized for not being able to share 
the food with us. The best he could do, he said, was to let us smell his
breath after he finished eating, if we were interested. We weren't.

The tinsmith

One of the favorite stops for all of us was the African compound, probably because we could easily imagine we were back in Ghana. We recognized the woven fish trap (hanging beside the pole on the left side of the picture), the food, the gourds. They even had bamboo and banana plants growing nearby. 

But best of all was the family time. To humor our ride-loving threesome, we rented a golf cart instead of walking two miles around the premises. Walking would have made the most sense, considering we were breaking up a road trip, but the fun of a golf cart easily offset the missed exercise. We drove from one house to the next, happy to be together on a stunning September day.

Waiting in the shadows for the forge's volunteer
to return from his lunch break

Our success in breaking up the journey to South Carolina with the museum and a hotel for the night made us appreciate Steve Gilliland's advice to enjoy the ride.

With that insight freshly impressed upon us, John and I asked the children if they'd like to stop for the night to break up the 11-hour drive home. But anticipating a school holiday the next day, they opted to drive hammer-down with bug-eyed determination through travel weariness and boredom and get home yet that night. 

We humored them. I suppose this means none of us are completely cured of Destination Disease.  

But perhaps we are on the road to recovery. When we only had a few hours to go, our youngest said, "Mommy, I need to snuggle with you." The van needed fuel anyway, so we stopped and fueled up, then sat in the parking lot an extra ten minutes for no better reason than to let the youngest snuggle with his best mommy.

I call that enjoying the ride.