If you want to get strange looks, use this response when someone asks you where you're going for your vacation: "Don't know." If you say it in January, talking about a trip the following summer, it's no big deal. Say it Friday, though, about Saturday's journey, and people think you're crazy.
We made our decision in the parking lot of an Ogden grocery store, as we sipped newly purchased bottles of water.
"South," we decided, before hopping back in the car and heading to the freeway.
It was the first — and so far, only — "girl trip" in my family. My sister, my niece, two of my nephews' young wives and I were taking a week to go wherever.
The destination wasn't the purpose of the 2003 trip; being together was. We packed both camping gear and fancy clothes for dinner.
We used our cell phones to call our husbands as we stood on the Four Corners monument. I had one foot in Arizona, another in New Mexico and no idea where I'd end up.
It was really very unlike me. I tend to plan, make lists, book hotel rooms months in advance. Sometime around the end of my college days, when I entered the work force full-time, I put away my backpack and my meandering ways and settled into a be-prepared groove. When I take a car trip, I usually know how many miles it is to the next rest area. I not only know where I'm going, but how I'm going to get to the hotel from the airport, long before I ever leave home.
But life isn't like that, a fact that's been driven home to me repeatedly in the three years since we made our girl trip back into spontaneity. In the nearly three years that have passed, my mother has died, my brother has been to war and back, my sister's husband lost a leg, one of the nieces-in-law on the trip moved to Japan for a couple of years. We've celebrated a lot of wins and endured some hefty losses.
As we stood at Four Corners, not one of us would have predicted any of those events.
Some of the best times at my house recently have been the unplanned ones, the moment carved out of a too-busy day to sit on the porch and eat slushies as the sun goes down. Or the side-trip to find Aly a bathroom that somehow turned into a drive to Antelope Island. Or just driving down Redwood Road trying to count the birds that lined up on the telephone line as far as the eye could see.
I'm reclaiming that part of my life, wrestling it back from the overbooked schedules we've slowly built. The girls really don't need to be taking swim lessons and violin lessons and participating in chess club and other after-school activities all the time. We're so over-extended we don't have time to just drop down to the neighborhood pool and paddle around a bit for the joy of it.
I don't need to work my regular shift, then go home and do phone interviews with all the people I missed during a day filled with five hot rounds of telephone tag. Not all the time, anyway.
Ask my girls in 20 years what their childhood was like and they'll probably remember at least some of these prescribed activities. I'm hoping, though, that they also remember leisure time we spent together, not just the mad rush from place to place and goal to goal. It will probably be easier to remember, though, if it actually takes place.
My husband's better at making free time. He's big on the quick bike ride to the convenience store with the girls to buy a sweet. Or the delayed bedtime to look through the telescope at something cool in the sky. Tuesday, Beaux dragged them out for an unexpected trip to the skating rink, where they went around and around until they were beyond exhausted. And unbelievably happy.
Deseret Morning News staff writer Lois M. Collins may be reached by e-mail at lois@desnews.com