What is the appeal of travel? What is our perverse fascination with the unknown and new? Is it the interesting cultures we behold before our eyes? The belly-stuffing goodness of the food? Heck, could it even be the climate that makes us move?

For me it was the drive.

My aunt and uncle’s family live in beautiful Spring, Texas, a mere 833 miles and 12 hours from my hometown in Lilburn, Georgia. Since we don’t have the money to take me, my grandma, my mother and my siblings to Texas on the plane, we take the next most viable route- the car.

Now, call me crazy. I am a geography and culture fanatic. Just the thought of going there makes me feel all tingly. So any vacation to any out-of-state location is fine by me!

Our first visit was the picturesque forests of West Georgia. Even though I like Georgia, the real fun began when we crossed the Chattahoochee River and the West Point Lake to State of Alabama.

Now, we had made the trip to Spring, Texas so many times (a record 4) that we would always know which parts to expect.

In Alabama, we would always stop momentarily at a rest stop in the southeast. We would also look at the billboards for all of the fireworks factories that were located on the borders.

One of the favorite parts of the drive I liked so much was the Mobile Bridge. These bridges were on 1-10. They were always so pretty to gaze over and see the wide, wide rivers and bays. When that part always came I would signify my siblings to come and peer out on to the windows. The marshes and streams always gave us kids a fleeting moment of awesome in an otherwise long 12-hour nonstop drive.

One thing I remember so vividly is when we would cross state border lines. My mom, in her Nigerian accent of hers, would always exclaim, “Here we come guys! Mississippi!” whenever the car passed the border. She would then read out the billboard notifying that we were in the state. My whole family would always celebrate with woo-hoos and anticipation. I would always remind my family that the journey was not over.

The beautiful weirdness intensified in Louisiana and Mississippi. Although Louisiana was We looked over to the swamps and marshes of the Pascagoula and went to a gas station in Grosse Tete.

Ah, Grosse Tete. I still remember the smell, the weird name, and the fact my atlas said we were technically in a swamp. I had read in a Wikipedia article about Grosse Tete that there was actually a gas station with a live tiger as an attraction. Horrified, I warned my mom not to go to that one gas station. (Thankfully, we did not.)

The final significant portion of our story lies in Lake Charles, Louisiana. There, my family- or at least me- noticed that smell that just emanated from the area. To this day, I don’t know if it was car exhaust or factory fumes or sulfur dioxide, but that was one powerful fume!
We left the industrial nightmare that is Lake Charles and finally entered Texas, and we were gratified. We had been in the car for 10 hours and my siblings had been getting reckless. And after 2 hours, we had finally reached our destination.

But you know what? I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Texas. I loved the hot weather and the wide, white roads. But I loved most about my trip was not just the destination. It was getting there.