This time last year it was the garden that was beckoning me, and powerfully so. For weeks I could barely type for 10 minutes without strolling around it and deciding what to plant where.  This year, for the first time in eight years, I may not have a garden. Instead I can't stop thinking about the road. As in, road trip.  A lot of Americans love road trips. I've been one of them ever since I traveled from San Francisco to Boston to start college--via bus, because my brother told me that if I flew from coast to coast, I'd think there was nothing in between. I've driven all over the country since then, and across the width three times, including one three-month journey west after college.  Federal Highway Administration data shows that motor vehicle miles traveled per person declined for 17 months running, from 2007 to early 2009. Then, last summer, Americans started increasing their driving again. My own family is doing lot more driving because it's considerably cheaper than flying.  For nearly a decade running we've made the 10-hour trip from D.C. to South Carolina for an annual beach vacation; twice we've schlepped to Iowa. Two years ago we crossed 10 states en route from D.C. to Vermont to Cleveland and home.  This is no small feat with young children.  The little strapped-in ones are not meant for long hours in a car, as we found out when our children were infants. At age two months, our daughter screamed through much of our drive to South Carolina, inspiring me, after several failed attempts to comfort her, to climb out of the back seat and into the front passenger seat while the car was still moving, in hopes of saving my eardrums.  In retrospect, I don't blame her. I mean, she wasn't even tall enough to see the lack of scenery along I-95. She wasn't old enough to be excited about the Starbucks ( SBUX - news - people ) and Krispy Kreme ( KKD - news - people ) drive-throughs, or to realize that we were trading a day of boredom for a week of sand, surf and doting grandparents.  Now she's 8 and our son is 6. And now we have bigger plans. This summer we plan to take a 12-week drive across the country, mostly staying with family and friends and camping, as we follow Lewis and Clark's path west before wandering down the Pacific Coast and across the southwest on our way home. I'll be writing from the road; my husband is supplementing his vacation with unpaid time off so he can fly in and out to spend about half the trip with us, including most of the driving parts.
I'm trying not to think about the math: two adults plus two kids in one minivan for 12 weeks across 5,000 hot, hot miles.