“As we settled into the car and pulled onto the highway, I felt a joy of nostalgia. Though we had traveled many places together since The Odyssey, this was the first time we had road-tripped again, just the two of us. I was about to launch into a string of Rememberwhens when I spotted Daphne’s belly swelling over her seat belt and realized no, now there are three of us.”
— “Road Sisters” by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Count On Me: Tales of Sisterhoods and Fierce Friendships
ESCRITORA CHALLENGE: Write about a road trip that changed your life in some way. Share your short piece in the comments section below! It can be as short or as long as you’d like.
Below is a an example written by comadre Alexandra M. Landeros, who earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University in 2004 and wrote her thesis under the direction of renowned Latino author Dagoberto Gilb. Her articles and columns have been published in Latino Magazine and TODO Austin, and she is currently working on a collection of nonfiction short stories about growing up in the United States and Mexico.
Big Sur, California
My first road trip ever was the summer before my senior year of college. With just a month left to go of my junior year, I suffered a difficult emotional event that led me to take “incompletes” for all my courses and return to my parents’ house all the way across the country, from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles. A few days before I left campus, I had a brief conversation with a friend who would turn out to be – sixteen years later – a true compadre.
We shared a first name, although he had the male version of my name. We also shared a spirit of adventure. He was one of the few people I’d met who did not seem to fear the unknown, who was willing to see things a bit differently from everybody else. When I told him why I was leaving campus before the end of the semester, he didn’t judge me. He suggested we stay in touch and that perhaps I might like to join him on a road trip up the coast of California. But I was used to empty promises, and I wasn’t sure if I’d really hear from him.
Shortly after he graduated, I received a call from him. He was on his way from Massachusetts to California for his new job in the Silicon Valley. He said he’d take a detour through Los Angeles to pick me up. So I bought a one-way plane ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I had no idea what to expect during our travels up the Pacific Coast Highway.
It would have been easy for us to begin a romance at the beginning of our journey, but we didn’t. Instead, we redirected our energies at soaking in the quirks of our adventures. Eating Danish beef jelly in the quaint town of Solvang, camping in the mountains of Big Sur and marveling at the humongous starry skies, wondering about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and going in search of the glass elevator at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco to get the best view of the city. It turns out we did have a brief romance, but our friendship outlasted the love affair and the mutual hurt that followed.
He now has a wife and three young boys, still living in the Bay Area. I’ve married someone else, although I don’t yet have children of my own. But I still listen to much of the same music I listened to because of him, I still read some of the same books, and I still stop to contemplate many of the same things we used to contemplate.
We don’t talk often, and it’s usually by email. And if I ever knew he was in trouble, I wouldn’t judge, and I’d be there for him. Even though we will likely never take a road trip together again, part of him has always been with me on every road journey I’ve taken since the summer of 1997.