Life is a highway, or so "they" say

I am taking a little trip by myself this weekend, nowhere too exotic, Green Bay, WI, to be exact. This may not be that big of a deal to most people, but I am not most people. I am one who has for the majority of my life been petrified of traveling. The unfamiliarity of it all that thrills most scares me to my core. I like to know where I am, to have everything around me be familiar and the same. Newness of locale can be a very frightening thing.

I have traveled alone before. I’ve flown to southern California to visit family by myself, and I’ve also flown by myself to Oregon to go to a friends wedding. But you see that was a mere few hours of terror alone and then the rest of the trip was terror with friendly, familiar faces. This trip will be entirely alone. Just me. I am horrified and excited. I can feel my nerves dancing up and down my spine even as I just type about it. And it’s true I won’t be ENTIRELY alone, but I won’t know a single soul who’s there with me.

I realize I’ve never said what this trip is actually for. I am a member of the Downtown Kenosha Kiwanis Club. Yes it is true, I’m mildly dorky. While we don’t wear water buffalo hats, we do sing and say the national anthem and there’s at least one member who regularly tells off colored jokes. I am the youngest member of this club. I joined because my boss asked me too. Kiwanis is the sort of club that you can’t just go to and join, you have to be invited to a meeting. My boss just happened to know a customer whose wife was a member. As it turns out, this lady is someone I vaguely know. She lived on the same street as my grandma and my mom and aunts used to babysit for her all the time. My whole family knows her, but after my mom’s generation nobody’s heard of her. She was thrilled to see “Debi’s daughter!” as she kept shouting loudly in her German accent. She told me the story of how she was a German war bride and was so excited to move to America and it was all very romantic.

So of course at my first ever Kiwanis meeting, I got this huge introduction. Well, I didn’t, but my grandma, mom and aunts all did. And she told stories of them that not even I had ever heard. So after a few awkward weeks, I was officially inducted into the club. Which isn’t really that bad of a thing; my work pays my membership dues and in return I get two free lunches a month at The Boathouse Pub & Eatery down on at the lake. We have all sorts of guest speakers who teach us all sorts of things such as how a team from the Kenosha Water Utility went down to somewhere in Central America and helped build a irrigation system, how the ambulance system works, that you can check out CPR videos and dolls at the local library, about the KRM Railway system that is trying to get up and running, the Chancellor of UW-Parkside is coming soon, the owner of the Kenosha News has come and talked about the paper in it’s heyday and how it runs now. These sorts of things are what I hear about every 1st and 3rd Wednesday of the month while I eat my free lunch with a bunch of old people. But they’re not just old; there are actually a lot of “higher ups” in the community in my club. The director of Kenosha Public Works, the director of the Kenosha Parks Commission, the director of the City of Kenosha Real Estate, various aldermen, the director of the Kenosha Transit System and me. I think it’s pretty hysterical and a random part of my life, but it’s kind of fun!

The whole object of Kiwanis is to “Change the world, one child at a time”. So we raise money by selling beer at local community events to help children. And the irony of that is not lost on me, but that’s just the way they do it. The winter months are the “planning” months and the summer months are the “executing the plan” months. I get to go to different events and have a 2-4 hour shift of either selling tickets or beer or whatever they have me do. It’s kind of nice to get out in the community and mingle with the common folk, ya know?

All that to say, I am going out of town this weekend to go to the Wisconsin/Upper Michigan Kiwanis Mid-Winter Convention. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am in no way a fanatical Kiwanian like some of my club mates. I’m more the sort of Kiwanian who sits on the sidelines and laughs to herself at the silliness of it all.

However, I decided to go to the convention for two reasons. First being that at the beginning of the year I made a list of things that I would like to do this year. One of the things on that list is “Take a trip somewhere by myself even if just for one night”. When I wrote that I in no way envisioned myself at a Kiwanis Convention. I was thinking more of a quaint little B&B somewhere in the country where I could pretend to be “getting away from it all and working on my writing”. So at first mention of convention (haha that rhymes), I had ZERO inkling to go. But then my ears perked up as I was biting into my BLT when they mentioned the board of our club approved full paid expenses to one member if they wanted to go. As I chewed my too-dry-not-nearly-enough-mayo-BLT I started contemplating the trip. I didn’t specify that they trip couldn’t be a convention, just that I had to go alone. Then I thought of the movie ‘About A Boy’ simply because there’s a group in that movie called S.P.A.T., which stands for Single Parents Alone Together. And I thought, why not go somewhere where I’m alone, yet together too. And that settled it. I requested off work and now it’s here already. I’m going to a Kiwanis Convention. (I still can’t help giggling at the sheer ridiculousness of it.)

This brings me back to the travel issue. A few years back I went to Oregon as I mentioned earlier. My friend Melissa played a somewhat cruel joke on me. She knew there was no way in a million trillion years I would ever fly by myself to a place I’d never been to go to her wedding where she was the only person I knew. So she asked me to be a bridesmaid. And how on God’s green earth do you tell your dear friend that no you will not be in her wedding because that means you’ll have to spend 5 days with people you don’t know in a place you’ve never been and the only reason is that you’re just plain scared. I’ll tell you how you do it—you don’t. You scream and yell and hoot and holler and dance around your living room while on the phone with her. Then afterwards you immediately break down into tears and call your sister-in-law. Then you spend the rest of the day sleeping to avoid the whole thing. And that is how you deal with the thought of traveling.

But my hand went up at that Kiwanis meeting and out loud I said, “I would love to go if the Club would sponsor me to go”. Immediately someone motioned that I go, then there was a second motion and then everyone in favor said “Yay” and there weren’t any opposed to say “Nay” except my inner self whom I was ignoring.

That was four weeks ago.

I’ve had four weeks to prepare my mind to not freak out. It’s totally fine, people do this sort of thing all the time, it’ll be fun, and you can stop and pee any time you want! But oh man, I have gone #2 a lot today which is probably not the sort of thing a woman should write on her blog but is what happens when I get nervous. I haven’t packed (it’s only one night, do I need to pack early?) or done any laundry (I don’t think I need to do laundry before the trip, maybe I’ll wait til I get back) or changed my burned out brake light (I should definitely do that before I go) or gotten an oil change (do you need to get an oil change before taking a 2 ½ hour drive?) or renewed my license plates (they don’t expire til March 4th, but I did get that thing in the mail so would it be better to just get my new sticker before the trip?) or anything. You’d think I was driving across the country, which if I lived in England I would be, so as you can clearly see, everything is relative. Hmm.

 

And one more thing—I think I’m supposed to somehow document me taking my trip alone (according to the rules of the list). Would it be weird to ask a stranger to take my picture in front of the hotel? Then again, if I’ll never see them again…