It’s incredibly American to road trip. There’s a sense that you are really living the American Dream when you are driving across the country. People are enthused (and yet, a little horrified) to hear that you have, in the past month, thrown your packed and loaded your very energetic family in a house on wheels and decided to just keep on driving.

Already I have seen that the traveling people are a sweet type of people. They give you rides in their golf cart as you try to trek your five year old and threenager across an expansive RV park for 4^th of July fireworks. They get your son to try apple butter on his biscuit at a diner not knowing they have just asked the pickiest eater on the planet to eat something new. They offer you advice at the dumping station while you do your first waste elimination ever (not a fun part of RV life and I would recommend you make yourself appear very busy the next time someone asks you to help out with that) and they give you maybe a little bit amused looks as you attempt to direct your husband into a gas station corral. Let’s just say that according to Michael, my next job WILL NOT be a traffic cop. Or a construction worker, or even one of those people that tell you where to park at amusement parks and festivals.

What has overwhelmed me the most so far on the trip is its purity. There’s nothing purer than rasting marshmallows on a fire that your husband and kids built with wood they collected. There’s nothing purer than a late night slathering of calimine lotion on your three year old’s back while she counts the Hello Kitty band aids you have applied to her knees over the past 48 hours. There’s nothing purer than your golden retriever drawing a crowd at the playground, children in wet bathing suits and dirty feet begging to pet her. There’s nothing purer than your family eating ice cream on a bench swing, or as Celia affectionately calls them, “family swings.” There’s nothing purer than mini golf, lightning bugs, dirty cereal bowls in the sink and rainbow mustaches of an ice cream flavor called “Super Kid” that you got at the little stand at the RV park.

As much as this is a family vacation, this is a classroom of humanity. Collecting the conversations, the exchanged smiles and the surprising good deeds that people pay you along your journey. An odyssey of good will and good deed.

This morning, we awoke in Colorado in the backyard of good friends of Mike’s. Here we can catch up on laundry, bathe the kids in a bathtub if they so insist, eat some good home cooked non-camp food and let Chewy chase some rabbits. Last night they helped us plan our next departure route to the Grand Canyon (not leaving for 6 days or so) and helped us choose where to make reservations for our trip to Yellowstone. Pure, sweet and wholesome road tripping. I could get used to this.