A couple posts ago, I mentioned that I was in the process of planning a road trip with my daughter Corinne and my best friend Stephanie (Don’t Get Stuck in the Middle of Nowhere). I knew we would need something different to clear our heads after Dennis’s Celebration of Life (A Celebration of Dennis, for His Birthday), and what better way than to go on a mostly unscripted adventure?

The plan was to travel a route of 3,776 miles through 13 states, stopping first at Mount Rushmore and then at the Grand Canyon with some overnights to break up the drive. The original trip was supposed to be to the Grand Canyon and back, but I couldn’t find anything much to do on the way, so I opted for a bit of a detour north to see Mount Rushmore since I have never been there either. Our actual mileage tally (courtesy of State Farm’s Drive Safe & Save tracker) was 4,540.2 miles.

I am blessed to love and be loved by some awesome people. We laughed a lot on this trip, which is exactly what we needed. We spent more time driving than we planned (see the Lessons Learned below). We played car games. And Stephanie and I annoyed Corinne…a lot. It was a great trip 😉—exhausting, but great. We’re not sure where the next one will take us, but we know it will be shorter because this was a much bigger undertaking than I expected. Next time, we’re going to pick one destination, order a visitor’s guide, and spend a lot more time in one place. Who knew there was so much to see in South Dakota?!

13 states.
4,540.2 miles.
Infinite memories.
Positively priceless.

Lessons Learned

Bathroom breaks will always be more frequent than you expect. They say that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Knowing we were going to be in the car for a long time, I planned to stop about every three hours—go to the bathroom, stretch our legs, exercise the dog, get something to eat, buy a state magnet. Apparently, our bladders had other plans and refused to synchronize. I mean, is that too much to ask? 🤣 Sometimes we made it 2.5 hours. Other times, we were lucky to make an hour. Don’t get me wrong. We ALL went every time we stopped, but it didn’t matter. When you gotta go, you gotta go.

Mount Rushmore is way smaller than you realize. My son-in-law warned me about this. He said to let him know once we saw it, and he was totally right. I’ve seen pictures all my life, but I had never seen it in person. It was cool, and I’m glad we went, but we spent more time eating lunch and standing in line for ice cream (which was amazing, by the way—I highly recommend the Thomas Jefferson vanilla) than we did admiring the monument and taking pictures. So if you’re planning a trip to South Dakota just to see Mount Rushmore, order the visitor’s guide and look for other things because Mount Rushmore really won’t take long. Speaking of which….

The Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, SD, is a hidden treasure that you should definitely visit. In 1974, a housing developer was leveling some land to build up, and they discovered a seven-foot tusk along with some other bones. Recognizing that there was something way more valuable there than a future housing development, The Mammoth Site came into being. We saw the signs for it on the way back from Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, and we checked the visitor’s guide that Stephanie’s parents gave us. Turns out, it was literally a mile from our hotel, so we decided to check it out. We spent more time there than at Mount Rushmore.

An active archeological dig with at least 1,200 bones and currently 61 mammoths partially excavated, The Mammoth Site is just really cool to see. We even talked about going back in about five years just to see how much changes because there are clearly sections that haven’t been uncovered yet. Adults will be amazed by this, and kids will just love it because what kid doesn’t love Ice Age? (It made us want to watch the movies when we came home. 🎥🍿)

Unless you’re going to Yellowstone National Park, there is nothing to see in Wyoming. We were not going to Yellowstone. We were passing through southeast Wyoming on our way to Arizona. It was a road trip, so we were taking pictures of the “Welcome to” whatever state we were entering because that’s what you do on a road trip. We missed the sign for Wyoming. It was the middle of the day. We were watching for the sign. We missed it and had to go back.

We also decided that you know you’re in the middle of nowhere when you see an attraction sign (you know the blue ones that highlight the cool things coming up ahead along with food stops, gas stations, etc.) that says “Roadside Table 1 Mile” for a picnic table on the side of the road. No umbrella. No shade. No bathroom. Literally a picnic table in a turnout on the side of the road. I swear that I am not kidding.

If you’re visiting Grand Canyon National Park, do yourself a favor and book a plane tour. It’s a hefty price tag, especially if you are a couple with multiple kids (about $150 per person), but it’s something you’ll probably only do once in your life. Saying it’s worth the price is an understatement. I have to credit a high school friend who mentioned his trip on Facebook and said that it was the best way to see it. That’s what made me book it. Grand Canyon Scenic Airlines provided us with a great experience. For 45 minutes, we saw the Grand Canyon that you can’t see from the ground. We passed over sections that don’t have roads beside them, that people clearly can’t get to. And it was amazing and beautiful and spectacular. You really have to see it to believe it.

Google is your friend on a road trip. Did you know that 40% of U.S. land is used for farming? Yeah, neither did we. I have lived in the Midwest all but four months of my 55 years. I’m used to seeing farmland once I’m out of my suburban bubble just outside of Chicago. But while we were driving and driving and driving along so many one- and two-lane interstates (which I also did not know were so freakin’ common) seeing soooooo many cows and wind turbines, I blurted out, “Exactly how much of this country is farmland?!” And Google gave us the answer.

Not gonna lie, I was not aware before this trip that the percentage was so high. Now that I’ve seen so much farmland, I’m not surprised. Google also told us how wind turbines worked, and we questioned why Illinois does not have more. Google taught us that the weird red lights we saw in the sky at night were, in fact, the wind turbines that we weren’t able to see because it was so dark. Google told us the exact coordinates of the Forrest Gump sign in Utah (37.10257, -109.98932) because it is so easy to miss that we drove past it three times.

Google gave us the street addresses for “the corner in Winslow, Arizona” from “Take it Easy” by the Eagles and some sites from Breaking Bad in Albuquerque, NM, that Stephanie wanted to check out along the way. Google also told us that it really wasn’t worth the $22 per person entry fee to see the meteor crater in Winslow even though we thought it would be really cool. (If we had been staying and not just passing through, it might have been worth it to spend the time in the museum, but we literally just saw all the billboards hyping it up along the road and thought it would be an interesting photo op.)

We live in a gorgeous country with so much history and so much to see, and we really don’t appreciate it. I know that I have not seen as much of our country as I could have by this point in my life, which is one of the reasons I decided on a road trip with Corinne. I want her to explore our country. I want her to see all the things I haven’t had a chance to see before now. But as we walked up to one of the lookouts at the Grand Canyon, someone had spilled a container of fries on the ground and left them there. People don’t pick up after their dogs. You can see litter everywhere.

This is something I’ve known for a while from a trip I took to Niagara Falls one year when I decided to visit from both the Canadian side and the U.S. side. Not saying Canadians are perfect, but they certainly care more about not dropping their trash on the ground than we do, and that makes me really sad. We live in an amazing place, and I wish we took better care of it. We should definitely feel guilty about that.

Sandie Jones has a new release called The Guilt Trip about a destination wedding that was way more eventful than our road trip. Check it out.

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Book Review

⭐⭐⭐½
3.5 Stars for The Guilt Trip by Sandie Jones

320 pages
Publisher: Minotaur Books (St. Martin’s Press)
Publication Date: August 3, 2021
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher’s Description

They went away as friends.
They came back as suspects.

Rachel and Jack. Paige and Noah. Will and Ali. Five friends who’ve known each other for years. And Ali, Will’s new fiancée.

The three couples travel to Portugal for Ali and Will’s destination wedding. Arriving at the gorgeous clifftop villa, the weekend away is a chance to relax and get to know Ali a little better. A newcomer to their group, she seems perfectly nice and Will seems happy after years of bad choices.

But when Rachel discovers a shocking secret about Ali, everything changes. As the wedding weekend unfolds, the secrets each of them holds begin to spill, and friendships and marriages threaten to unravel.

In Sandie Jones’s explosive new suspense novel, jumping to conclusions can become the difference between life and death.

************

Main Characters:

• Jack & Rachel – married 20 years with an 18-year-old son Josh who just began studying at university. They married after Rachel got pregnant at 24. Jack works as an A&R Director for a record company. Rachel has been best friends with Noah since they attended university together.
• Noah & Paige – married with a 16-year-old daughter Chloe. Rachel and Jack’s best friends, who are the godparents for Chloe. Paige works as a lawyer.
• Will & Ali – engaged. Will is Jack’s brother, and Ali used to work for Jack, having recently left to work for a competitor. Will is kind of a nomad, moving from exotic place to exotic place, and Ali is a boisterous personality. Their wedding is set to take place in Portugal.

So many secrets!!

I have read two previous books by Sandie Jones, both 5-star reads. I’m giving The Guilt Trip 3.5 stars, and I’ll explain why in some spoilers below.

This book is what I have come to think of as typical Sandie Jones. With every chapter, everyone becomes more and more suspect. You never know who can be trusted, even your own instincts as you read, because as soon as you think you have things figured out, something happens to misdirect you.

There’s a prologue to this where someone is dead. We clearly don’t know who, just that there’s a policeman asking someone if they knew the deceased. Cut to chapter 1 where everyone but Will is at the airport getting ready to leave for Portugal. Ali is being what appears to be her typical flighty and boisterous self, to the annoyance of everyone else. But she’s marrying Jack’s brother, so she’s going to be part of the family so they have to at least try to get along.

Throughout the book, we learn a lot of back story and a whole lot of secrets. Everyone, with the exception of Will, seems to have a secret in this story. Jack has a secret about Ali. Ali has a secret about Jack. Rachel and Noah have a secret from when they were in university together. Ali discovers a secret in Portugal. Paige is confronted about a secret. There’s more, but I don’t want to say too much.

The story is told mainly from Rachel’s perspective. I wouldn’t call her naïve exactly, but she seems to be the least worldly. When Jack reveals the secret he has about Ali, Rachel wants more information because she doesn’t want Will to be hurt. While she’s looking for information, she finds things that throw suspicion on others, and I feel like she is too quick to give everyone but Ali the benefit of the doubt.

I don’t want to give too much away because, as I said, Jones is very good at misdirection and I don’t want to spoil this for anyone who doesn’t figure things out. The story is definitely faster paced at the beginning, and I think there are elements at the end that don’t necessarily add up for the story, which is why I knocked it down to 3.5 stars. Still worth the read though, especially if you’re already a Sandie Jones fan.

***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***

So the major thing I didn’t like about this is how Ali is portrayed once we find out she really isn’t the villain here. When Ali’s relatives talk with Rachel, they talk about Ali as if she should be sainted or something. Everything she does, she does for good.

She stayed with her mother 24/7 for two years because she blamed herself for the accident that put her mother in a wheelchair. She created a new persona after losing a lot of weight because she didn’t want a reminder of the bullying she experienced for being morbidly obese. She would never do anything to hurt Rachel, so she wanted Jack and Paige to come clean before she exposed them to Rachel herself. She can see clearly how Rachel and Noah are still in love and meant to be together.

The other piece that bothered me was all the “stuff” that happens to wrap up the story, which doesn’t really wrap it up at all. The climax of the story is when Rachel confirms that Jack and Paige have been having an affair for a couple of years, and then a car slams through the wedding reception, running down multiple guests. Jack and Ali are both seriously injured, Noah seems not to be injured at all, and Paige is missing.

Clearly, we are to believe that Paige was driving the car. However, when we find out at the end that Jack’s watch was found in the car, and he had thrown out the theory to the police that Ali might have been driving the car and jumped out at the last minute, we are expected to assume that someone (Ali?) is trying to place Jack in the car because Rachel had found his watch in Ali’s room. But then the epilogue indicates that Rachel put the watch in Paige’s purse, so are we to assume that Paige was in the car alone?

You see what I mean? It left a lot of questions for me, and in a story like this one, you really want to know what happened. You don’t want to get to the end of a thriller and not know who the real bad guy is.

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