From the field: Not a fan of driving long distance

Hannah Alden, Reporter, The Record-Review Spending time in the car is not my favorite activity. When I was a kid, most everywhere we went — the grocery store, school, family events — was within 15-20 minutes of our home. In the last several years, I’ve usually had to travel well over 30 minutes to most places.

This change comes with living farther outside of city hubs and due to my own preferences to shop at stores that are located in more populated areas. There are a lot of things I can get locally, either in Abbotsford or Medford, but sometimes my grocery list warrants a trip to Wausau or Marshfield. By the time I arrive in one of those areas, get through my list of errands and return home, it can end up being a whole day spent elsewhere.

Growing up, our longest travels were to the family cabin, which was a four and a half hour journey. I was always antsy by hour three and ready to jump out of the moving vehicle when we rounded the corner leading to the cabin. My husband, Tyler, was raised traveling a lot more. His family did trips to places like Colorado in his dad’s truck on a regular basis. He drives quite a bit for his job now, too.

For those reasons, Tyler doesn’t have as hard of a time sitting in a car for a few hours as I do. Over the weekend we went down to the West Bend area for our niece’s birthday party. It was a long day, with almost six hours in the car there and back, and only a few hours actually spent with family. We’ve also recently been taking trips to pick up used farm equipment and supplies, which eats up a lot of time. I’m looking forward to the next several weeks when I’ll have good excuses to stay around home, with planting (hopefully) getting going soon and markets starting up.

While thinking about driving long distances, I remembered when I was in college Tyler and I drove my grandma back to Wisconsin from Florida, where she would stay for the winter months. It was a pretty awful trip in a lot of ways — there was serious road construction that put us hours behind schedule and we drove through bad storms with tornadoes touching down nearby. But one of the highlights of the trip was grandma’s cat, George, who was the most relaxed animal I’ve ever seen in a car.

For most of the journey, he simply lounged, sprawled out in the backseat. When we were going through downtown Atlanta during rush hour traffic, George decided it would be a good time to roll down the window and admire all the people in the cars slowly passing by. We definitely got some interesting looks thrown our way.

Unlike George, our cats all hate the car. One of them always has an accident or two, the other one never stops crying and the third stays wide-eyed and terrified in the back of her carrier. When we moved last spring, all three of them were in my car during the two and a half hour journey. Let’s just say we were all ready to jump out of the car by the end of it.