Road Trip Diaries

transcribed from handwritten notes taken along the New England coast

I’m writing this with pen and paper, something I haven’t done since high school, before my parents got a monstrous PC that I immediately used to hone in on my typing skills via AOL Instant Messenger. I’ve never liked handwriting. I have sloppy print and it hurts my hand. But today, I have no choice. For the past week, my family of six has been on a screen free road trip up the New England coast. For us, this means no personal devices (phones, tablets, watches, laptops, etc), except for my husband’s dumbed down phone, reduced to maps, weather, and yelp.

The idea came to me in the thick of winter, a particularly harrowing time for parents and screens. I was sick of it, am sick of it. Like many families with Millennial parents and Gen Alpha kids, we are reliant on our devices. They control our light switches, thermostat, grocery cart, credit card, kitchen speakers. They control our social life, work life, homework, entertainment, calendar, news. They control everything, and it’s never more evident than in a home where it feels like we’re often stuck in half conversations, half attention spans, half a thought before we’re interrupted by the virtual world. In short, I felt like we were missing our life.

This is the part of an essay like this where I usually stop reading. I’m not interested in a reductive diatribe about the “good old days” and how technology is bad when I’m going to use it to share it with you. Instead, I’m setting the scene: Two parents, one high schooler, one middle schooler, and two elementary boys, headed up the coast to Sally’s Apizza in New Haven, Connecticut, to wait three hours in line to taste “America’s best pizza” with nothing else to do.

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This is the first time my family has done anything like this. Normally we pick a destination, the beach or the mountains, and stay the week. On this trip, we are up every morning at 6 a.m., on the road by 7. Even on the string of days at the same spot in Acadia, we must still get up early and drive. The line to park at Jordan Pond is so long we almost don’t get a spot.

To pass time in the van, I read my book. It’s a story about a family living on a tiny island not far from Antarctica, home to the world’s largest seed bank. The island was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the father and his three children are its final inhabitants.

One morning just outside Mystic, Connecticut, we wake to a gray sky. The front desk attendant says it’s from the wildfires in Canada. “Enjoy this while we still can,” I say to my kids, gesturing vaguely at various landscapes.

My oldest rolls his eyes. “You know you’re a buzzkill, right?”

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Every day I find myself cycling through every possible human emotion; joy, pride, sadness, fear, surprise, lust, guilt, shame. At the current moment: rage. Specifically at youth sports. The hold it has on my family and our community.

We found out this morning that my son is missing high school golf tryouts while we are away. It was a last minute change, but if he doesn’t show up this week, there’s a good chance he won’t make the team. Another one of my boys is missing his first soccer scrimmage. Another will have his first baseball practice the afternoon we return home. All of these events are weeks before school starts, in the heat of August, when one might think there’s still time to enjoy the boredom (freedom) that is summer.

I look out the window and wonder if I can avoid a lobotomy over the upcoming fall schedule. I dream of a world with flexible practices and balance between school, sports, and time to be a kid at home. A world where you can try a sport at nine or eleven and not already be “behind.”

I ask my children if anyone is interested in not playing their chosen sport this fall. “It’s okay to quit,” I say.

My daughter shoots me a menacing look. “I don’t think that’s something you’re supposed to say.”

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There are times of euphoria. After hiking the Flume Gorge in New Hampshire, we set off for Portland, Maine, and on the way run into natural water slides at a gorgeous spot tucked away in Franconia Notch State Park.

“The best parts are always unplanned,” my husband proclaims as we march to the bathhouse to change.

Due to the fact that I meticulously planned this trip without his help, he is not included in this story’s euphoria.

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Things I thought would be annoying:

1. Missing work emails

2. No google

3. Carting a heavy camera around my neck

Things that are actually annoying:

1. Not being able to call my husband (from separate hotel rooms, from the parking lot to grab a bag, when we briefly misplace our seven-year-old)

2. Repeatedly having to ask my family to take pictures of me

3. Not being able to immediately complain about this to my women

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At a diner in Ogunquit, a woman comes up to our table and says it’s been a long time since she’s seen a family sitting together at a table and no one is on their phone. My teenage son once again rolls his eyes. We are in the middle of a game of Skip-bo. I smile politely, but inside I am chastened. This is not how we normally operate. Not that we allow devices everywhere with our kids, but I know I’d usually pull out my phone while waiting for food to arrive. It’s second nature.

“We’re on a screen free roadtrip,” I explain. She nods and says that’s even better.

“We play cards at restaurants at home, don’t we?” I ask my husband later.

He shakes his head. We just get take-out. We don’t have time to go out to eat.

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I grew up outside of Philly, which means most of my family’s vacations were to Ocean City, Maryland, but we did venture to Maine once. My parents were excited to show us lobster (we hated it), hike the beautiful terrain (hated it), and swim in a lake (we wanted a pool). Yet in the end we said we loved Maine.

I think of this when it takes over an hour to park in Bar Harbor where we end up walking, hangry, for twenty minutes in the hot sun so we don’t miss the land bridge during low tide. I think of this when my third grader sits down on a sidewalk in Portland and refuses to “ever walk again.”

I think, oh yes, no matter what they will love Maine.

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There’s nothing quite like a lady who goes offline for five minutes and returns transformed. But will I be transformed? It doesn’t feel that way. Today we are headed home after a quick stop in the Bronx to see a Yankees game. I’m excited for my own bed, less so for the long to-do list that awaits me. As for returning to my phone, I feel nothing either way. By the middle of last week, the lack of screens in our lives had become a subplot. Instead, my focus has shifted to the existential: the meaning of life, my child’s bumpy entrance into puberty, the slow-burn terror of climate change.

It’s true, I’ve given my brain more time to wander.

A few things I hope I don’t forget: Playing bocce with sweetgum balls at the park across from Sally’s Apizza while my husband holds our spot in line. Watching my daughter jump into the freezing Atlantic Ocean, begging us not to leave. The quiet intimacy of the car, where, with nothing else to do, I reach back to scratch my seven-year-old’s leg until he falls asleep.

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