The truck started smoking on the interstate about twelve minutes in.
We were on our way back from Wyoming, towing a boat, deep into a round of road trip table topics, when Cara stopped mid-sentence and James said the two words nobody wants to hear in a moving vehicle. We pulled over. A guy on his phone nearly rear-ended us in the breakdown lane. We limped two miles to a Pilot and let it cool.
And then it got fixed. Actually fixed, we think, for the first time in close to a year.
The rest of the episode is what it was supposed to be. Table topics, which is the thing we do every once in a while where we answer off-the-wall questions and end up somewhere we didn't plan on going. How many national monuments have you actually seen? Your favorite fast food. One holiday to keep for the rest of your life.
That last one went somewhere neither of us expected, and so did the one about our favorite trip.
There's also a merry-go-round story, a playground Cara wasn't allowed to go to, and a disagreement about whether penguins live in Alaska.
Note for clarity: we were guessing wildly on the national monuments, and we were wrong more often than we were right. Mount Rushmore is a National Memorial. Glen Canyon is a National Recreation Area, though Rainbow Bridge National Monument sits inside it, so Cara was closer than she thought. The Lincoln Memorial is a memorial. Vermilion Cliffs and the Statue of Liberty are both genuinely National Monuments, which means we hedged on the two we got right and were certain about the ones we got wrong. The show with the moose walking through town is Northern Exposure, not Northern Lights. And Cara was right about the penguins.
Wall Drug comes up again, because it keeps coming up. The full backstory is in We Almost Drove Past It | Badlands, Wall Drug, and the Road Through South Dakota.
Somewhere in the middle of this one, Cara answers the favorite-vacation question with the first trip we ever took as Kerouacs Cruising. No trailer, no Starlink, everything we owned in a utility trailer, sleeping in the car in bear country, bickering most of the way. She calls it the turning point. Not because it went well. Because it was the trip where we decided we were going no matter what.
If you're somewhere near a decision like that and you can't see the other side of it yet, that's the whole thing we're working on over at The Reinvention Project. You don't have to be sure to start. We weren't.
Want to talk to us directly? Book a Connection Call — it's free, and it's just a conversation.
Find everything else at our Linktree, and if the show's been good to you, there's always Ko-fi.
