I don’t know the statistics about highway construction, but after spending the past year in Rapid City, where there seem to be a lot of projects going on in town. But so far on our trip, we haven’t encountered an inordinate amount of road construction. There is a fairly large project just east of Ashland, Montana. We waited a little over ten minutes for the pilot car. We were third in line. When we got to where the other about 60 mph, which is probably slower given Montana’s penchant for higher speed limits, and if it takes the pilot car 15 minutes to make a round trip, that means that there is about one car each mile going in each direction. That isn’t exactly heavy traffic. There were plenty of RV’s and lots of farm vehicles, but not as many semis as one might expect. I suppose that they figure that it is easier to stick to Interstate 90 when there is road construction.

We are camped at a lovely campground in Red Lodge, with Rock Creek right behind the camper. There is a big water main project going on in Red Lodge, so we had the feeling that most construction is going on in cities and towns this summer, with fewer projects on the open road. We don’t have much data to back it up, that’s just how it felt on this trip.

In addition to the brief detours for construction, we took a break for 15 minutes or so to wait out a thunderstorm in the parking lot of the Cabella’s store in Billings. It was a doozy of a summer storm with the rain falling in sheets and winds that I suppose were gusting to 50 mph or more. We didn’t have any trouble controlling our trailer, but since we were right in a city when we ran into the thundershower, it seemed easy to take a break and sit it out while we sipped ice tea in the comfort of our pickup cab. We’re on vacation after all and there was no need to add to the stress of driving. A few minutes later we were on our way.

It seems to me as I think about it this morning that life is really about the detours. At least the detours and surprises make for the best stories. If I were to just tell about a day when we were a little slow getting going and then the entire day went well with us arriving at our destination in time for a great meal of home-cooked tamales and fresh salad and then we tucked into bed in our camper with the river sound as a lullaby, there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell. The real adventures come from life’s detours.

While we were sitting out the rain shower and the winds, we noticed a beautiful little teardrop camper being pulled by a Volkswagen in the parking lot. The camper had Oregon plates and we followed it out of the parking lot and onto the highway. Once on the highway they traveled a bit faster than we. But when we arrived at our campground, they were checking in just ahead of us. What struck us was the saying that they had carefully painted onto the back of their camper: “Life isn’t about avoiding the storms. It is about learning to dance in the rain.” A slight modification of their motto might apply for me: “Life isn’t about avoiding the detours, it is about enjoying the break in the routine.”

Vacation itself might be viewed as a detour. At least it is taking a different route to get to a familiar place. The familiar place, of course is home. The vacation is where you go while you are away from home. We have always loved traveling and we have been looking forward to this trip for a long time. People keep asking us where we are going and we have no trouble naming the destination, but the best part of the trip is the actual traveling. At least on this vacation, the destination is only part of the story. We have an extra day for this week’s travels. We won’t meet our children until Friday and we could easily reach the place we’re going by Thursday. So we’ll be looking for and finding some interesting stops along the way. Much of the drive is at least a bit familiar to us. We’ve driven across Montana, Idaho and Washington a lot of times. But there are things we haven’t yet seen and obscure routes that we haven’t taken. Because we like to drive a bit slower than the rest of the traffic, we don’t mind getting of the Interstate Highways at all. We don’t go slow enough to be a problem on the Interstate, but we go slow enough that getting off of the Interstate often doesn’t cost us much time. When we lived in Idaho, I tried to find every way of driving across the border between Idaho and Montana. By the time we moved to South Dakota, we had traveled all of the paved routes and had begun to find some really obscure dirt tracks that would be impassable in the winter or when it gets muddy.

So we are off on a grand detour. And spending the night next to a roaring creek rushing down from the high country and rolling the boulders in the stream bed is a great way to make the transition from being at home to life in our camper. A good night’s sleep is soon to be followed by breakfast with Susan’s sister and husband who hosted us for a wonderful dinner last night. We have no particular goal for today other than just to make a few more miles in the right direction. It promise to be a good day for detours and we’re hoping that we find some that are good not only at getting us around the construction, but also at giving us stories to tell.

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