My husband and I are slow decision-makers. I’ve used euphemisms like “careful” and “deliberate” but we’re just slow.
The challenges of this particular year have managed to slow us down even further and our indecision is bordering on truly dysfunctional.
So when it came time to consider a 26-hour road trip to California to finally see family, I knew we’d have some trouble deciding whether or not we should do it.
To ease our process, I came up with a few questions to answer in order to determine if we were ready for a family road trip. I offer them here in case anyone else needs a little help with such a decision.
Quiz: Are You Ready for an Epic Family Road Trip?
- Are you prepared to relinquish control of every circumstance outside your car doors? This could include access to acceptable bathroom facilities, extreme weather swings, gas shortages due to illegal hacking, or the general crankiness of society at large.
- Can your optimism dominate the darkness of being belted down in an airless vehicle filled with screaming children, possibly some vomit, and the consuming feeling of endlessness?
- Do you have confidence your marriage or partnership can overcome a thousand sources of completely inane bickering?
- Will your vehicle hold all the stuff that has become “necessary” to the health, well-being, and general state of alleged happiness to which your children have become accustomed?
- Have you curried enough favor with neighbors, friends, and/or family for them to help maintain your home, that garden you finally planted, and your weirdly social and neurotic cat you have to leave behind?
- Will the quality of the experience at your destination overcome the enormity of the journey or will this become the Titanic against which all future family endeavors are to be compared?
- Will the hardest mile of your trip still be better than the status quo you’ve lived day in and day out for the past 14 months?
If you answered mostly yes, the trip is on! Even just a majority of yesses will give you the encouragement you’re looking for to take that trip.
If the nays have it, you also have your answer. There’s no shame in acknowledging reality.
True to form, my family has yet to decide. We have a hard time answering yes or no without qualifying it somehow and complicating the issue. Our decision will be forced in the next week or so if we want to avoid losing money on our reservations.
Then again, we’ve never met a deadline we didn’t want to defy.
