The drive to Vermont took three days. We left with a fully loaded car on Wednesday morning, an amazing feat of packing that covered all the basics but had room for little extra stuff. Board games count as necessities, more than a few clothes do not.
I wasn’t paying much attention to the route as we set off–I slept most of the first two hours. But as I started to stay awake longer and longer and look out the windows, I realized that the path we were on was a familiar one, and not because we were taking the fastest route across Kansas, a road I have been on many time. This was another road, with more recently gained familiarity. We were on the road to Kirksville, home of Truman State University and my home for the four years I had attended there.
We went within thirty miles of my college home that first day, but instead of turning north, we stayed east. It was painful to be so close and not go there, not stay for awhile. Hard to not be returning to the school where I had spent four happy years and where many of my friends had already gathered for the new semester. It would have been harder still to visit and then leave.
But we drove on, thirty miles south, and missed Kirksville. It was fitting, in a way, that the first leg of my trip to Grad School included the path I had driven back and forth to college.