The Plan

The plan was simple: 26 days, a blue soft-top jeep, a broken-up couple, and the open road.

The day after graduation, my mother handed me a new Rand McNally atlas inscribed with one sentence: "try not to fight too much". She had just asked me once again whether I was really sure that I wanted to go ahead with the planned trip even though Joe and I were broken up.

Both the atlas and the advice served us well that June as we criss-crossed the United States, coast to coast and back again in 26 days. In those days before cell phones, you really could cut yourself off from the world, just drop out for a while. Every morning, we would open the atlas and choose a destination. Sometimes we made it, sometimes we didn't.

We sped along long deserted stretches of American highway, top down, my long hair flying in the wind. By mutual accord, we didn't talk about the past or the future. Only about the present, the America we were discovering together. We both knew instinctively that it would be the last experience we would share together.

In Texas I tried Rocky Mountain oysters. In Utah we drove the jeep onto the salt flats. In New Mexico we drove out into the dessert and visited an ancient Indian village built into the mountain that was still inhabited. The little hand painted bowl I bought sits on my shelf, the only memento of that brief period of freedom in my life, the only time I took a break from my master plan, my career path, and just lived in the moment, day by day without a plan.

Tonight's Sunday Scribblings prompt is Plan. Head on over to see how that inspired others.