Two for the Road

The fastest speed is not the speed of light but the speed of imagination: the moment we imagine a scene, we are instantly there. When we decided to marry, we used our imagination to land in the land of happiness. And just like that, ten years have passed, full of every shade of joy, anger, love and resentment.

Every year on our wedding anniversary we usually set aside time to celebrate together. This year, we did nothing. He went for drinks with his friends. I had dinner with a few girlfriends. We texted back and forth. Everyone teased that it was a stag party and a hen party. And yet it was still fun! We believe love should happen naturally, woven into all our everyday joys and sorrows. And of course, we had a date: the following week we would put all work aside for a five-week trip to the US. Over the past few years, we had tried long domestic trips (from one to three months) to prepare for longer journeys to faraway lands.

Roaming across America

Why the US and not somewhere else? Truth be told, America was never on my list of priority destinations, even though I have relatives living there. Perhaps I had always thought of it as a place to study, work and live rather than to travel. But he had said he really wanted to explore American geology, having graduated in geology himself, and American geology is… “mind-blowing” (in his words, full of admiration). Just then, I received an invitation to my best friend’s wedding in Texas, on exactly our wedding anniversary. So two loving hearts set off eagerly. 38 days, 6 flights, 3 road trips, 4 states and 12 cities sum up the whole journey.

Truly, after this trip I changed my mind completely. Setting foot in vast new lands, I was so amazed I felt emptied out. The space inside me was as vast as the space spreading out before my eyes: deserts, mountain peaks, towering cliffs, rivers winding softly through canyons, nature’s great architecture… I must say, a road trip in the US is an incredible experience. America is so vast that I can say with certainty: everything we have heard about it, everything we are seeing and everything we will discover, put together, will never be enough to make a complete picture of America. Destinations are often far apart and the terrain is incredibly varied, so on a road trip we could take in breathtaking scenery to our hearts’ content and have plenty of time together on the road. The roads are wide, making driving wonderfully relaxing. In Texas, we drove from Houston to San Antonio, Austin and Big Bend National Park. Our next road trip, in Utah, began in Salt Lake City and went to Antelope Island and Zion National Park. From Zion we dipped down into Arizona to visit Antelope Canyon and Monument Valley, then headed to the town of Moab to see two national parks, Canyonlands and Arches. In California, we drove down the west coast through San Francisco and Santa Monica, detoured to Los Angeles and Hollywood, and ended in San Diego.

A long journey, exhausting but tremendously fun, because along the way we experienced so many new things together: where to rent a car, what to watch out for driving in the US (the rules for international licences differ by state), how Americans park and pay for parking at roadside meters or via apps, how to plan for certain places, and how weather, people and ways of life differ completely between every city, town and state we passed through… For the first time, we rode horses through the woods on the edge of the Wild West, kayaked at sunset on Lady Bird Lake (a reservoir on the Colorado River), slept in an RV (a vehicle fitted out as a comfortable home for travel lovers), stood under the oldest oak tree in Texas, kayaked through Santa Elena Canyon where the Rio Grande (the border between Mexico and the US) flows gently, ate barbecue and lay gazing at a sky thick with stars in the Chihuahuan Desert, climbed high mountains, marvelled at nature’s magnificent architecture, watched sea lions lounging on the pier and seagulls soaring carefree…

Throughout those days on the road, we didn’t forget to make some unforgettable memories. The day we kayaked on the Rio Grande, he accidentally dropped his drone into the water. We and the others in the group walked along the river trying to find it, reluctant to lose some gorgeous footage. His suggestion to hold hands and form a line across the river helped us find it stuck in the riverbed. On the way back, our American guide said, “I’m really impressed by your attitude. You lost something valuable, yet you weren’t angry or upset and stayed so positive.” For us, everything we own is illusory. Only the heart, the mind and our two hands are real. As long as we live kindly and passionately, we can create anything, from reality to dreams.

There’s more! I still burst out laughing whenever I remember the morning he set his phone on a rock in the desert to film a memento, then we drove off. He had driven 500 kilometres over five hours before I suddenly asked, startled, where his phone was. That’s when he remembered it was still on the rock. So we drove 500 kilometres back to where we started, then another 1,000 kilometres through the night to get where we needed to be. Two indescribably silly people who couldn’t stop grinning. In life, there are so many times we are forced to “turn back”. He doesn’t mind, and neither do I. How many times have we come close to the finish, then decided to drop the road and return to the start. We have always been able to begin again without fear, because we know for sure there is always someone ready to be by our side.

Two for the road

Scenes from the old film “Two for the Road”, starring veteran actors Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn, kept replaying in my head. The film follows a couple reflecting on their twelve-year relationship as they drive from England to the French Riviera. As they look at their present marriage, the evolution of their relationship unfolds through details from four earlier trips they took along the same route. They had been happy and passionate. They had also struggled with a vague distance as love cooled. They gathered many happy memories along their road trips, a few breakdowns and many arguments, acknowledging that both had changed over time, no longer their old selves, and even voicing the wish to divorce. But in the end, at the journey’s close, they realise they still love each other deeply. “Two for the Road” – two people, one road – seems to mean not only two people on a long drive; the “road” is also a metaphor for a life the two share. On a road trip we may come across flowers blooming by the roadside, watch brilliant sunrises and sunsets, see a rainbow after the rain; we may also be startled by a dark, glowering sky, get caught in a storm, break down and run into countless unwanted things. And so it is in a long relationship. What matters in the end is whether two people want to enjoy the beautiful things together, overcome the hard times and mend the cracks. A road trip – time spent wholly together – means more than we think.

Epilogue

Before we left, he took me to the bridal shop of an old friend who had made my very first wedding dress ten years ago, planning to choose one to bring on the trip for anniversary photos. I held two dresses up against me, smiled at him and said, “A 33-year-old bride feels very different from a 23-year-old one; it’s still a pure feeling, but now it’s a deep purity, when I’m mature enough to feel my inner flow more clearly and connect more strongly with everything around me.” I chose a white dress. White is the height of minimalism, the way a grown person sees clearly the road they have walked, are walking and will walk. Together, we have travelled so many bumpy roads. Because we have each other, even eating dinner under a leaky roof, raindrops plinking on the floor, didn’t bother us – it only felt incredibly romantic. With that optimism, we can now watch sunrises and sunsets together wherever we wish.

Sometimes a week feels endless; sometimes five or ten years fit into a single tape of memories that whizzes to the end. Wherever that tape is “paused”, it gives me faith that the moment someone rejoices in love is always a true moment. In the film, in every situation, the hero keeps telling the heroine, “I love you!” Believe that, for love is not eternal. Excessive expectation and the pessimism that refuses to believe in love are two cliff edges; get too close to either and you easily fall. Just stand calmly in the middle – feeling that it is perfectly ordinary for love to arrive, and perfectly natural for love to fade. Just trust and cherish love when that moment blossoms. I’m not sure what will happen in the next ten years, but I believe in our road in the present tense.