Day 18: Drive bys

Ann Dee Ellis' 8 Minute Memoirs in place of #NaNoWriMo.

I've always loved driving. Getting in my car and disappearing down a long, dark highway has always appealed to me. It probably helps that we took 2-4 road trips every year when I was growing up in Southern California. I grew very familiar with the stretches of freeway between Orange County and the Navajo reservation in eastern Arizona over my years of traveling there to visit my grandparents.

I still take road trips, although perhaps not as often as I did as a child. A couple years ago I drove to Chicago from Salt Lake City, and a recent trip to Vegas for a Rammstein concert was easily turned into a longer trip to my southern California home where I could visit the beaches I grew up on and still love so dearly.

Driving relaxes me, even now. Traffic is the only buzzkill as I cruise through cities and country. In college, I would often disappear in the middle of the night just so I could drive around the stretches of road near Rexburg. There's one large hill, and my second college boyfriend called it "Roller Coaster Road". I would go there when it was dark, turn off the headlights, and roll down it at speeds that were perhaps unsafe for the time of night and, probably unsafe at any time of day and visibility.

Driving by places like Disneyland always gives me a thrill, even if I'm not actually going to spend time there. Seeing places like that that are so big and bring me so much joy fade into the rearview mirror makes my heart grow. I couldn't tell you why.

My favorite things to drive by now are billboards. So many make me laugh. Mostly because of how ironically bad they are. Something about knowing that people throw hundreds of dollars at a company to print a bad joke in huge print above Salt Lake City entertains me through and through. I do wish sometimes that I had enough money to print my own terrible designs in large fonts over hundreds of people. Maybe someday.