Adventure — it’s in my genes

Hi! It’s Jennifer. We started this blog/vlog with cooking, the first word drawn by my parents. Now they’ve drawn another word, and this time we’re focusing on grandkids. I started this blog with an idea to share adventures I’m taking right now. As February has found me laid up with a broken ankle, my adventures this month have been mainly figuring out how to do everything on one foot, with crutches or from a knee scooter.

So I’m focusing this story on how my two grandparents helped foster a sense of adventure in me.

My grandmother lost her husband, my granddad, about a year before I was born. So I only knew Grandmother as a single, strong and fiercely independent woman. She had a dual role in my life — grandmother and my grade school teacher from first through sixth grades. With her summers free, every summer from about third grade to eighth grade, she loaded me and my cousins, Matt and Nate, into her car and took us on a road trip. Talk about a courageous woman! She did this while we were in the best behaved (insert eyeroll) times of our lives. These weren’t just trips of a few hundred miles. Nope, she hauled us across several states, took us on a train and even took us individually on our first airplane rides.

Hey, any of you grandparents out there ready to volunteer for something like this, with no other adult along as support? It’s not for the weak.

As a schoolteacher (in fact, our school teacher!), Grandmother always made sure these trips had an element of education. She planned routes with precise mileage maps printed out and set our path through many state political centers so I’ve seen state capitols in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. But there were also cultural, historical and iconic elements. Elvis Presley’s Graceland. The Trail of Tears in Oklahoma. Yellowstone National Park. And my all-time favorite, Laura Ingalls Wilder.

(Ok, no comments about hair styles, clothes, or my amazing photography skills from back then.)

We always hit a shopping mall, and I remember she even took us to the live-action He-Man movie. (Were we the only ones who saw that movie? I just IMDBed it. That movie came out in 1987. Such a cheesy 80s movies. I would have been 9. Ok, get back on track Jennifer!) Brave, brave Grandmother!  

While my grandmother was driving us across the country on road trips, my grandpa was instilling a different sense of adventure in me. Grandpa lived only an eighth of a mile from us on the farm. My grandma died when I was in third grade and after that, Grandpa took several mission trips to other countries. Haiti is the one that comes to mind. He bought me a book about a girl named Jennifer in Haiti. Wish I could find that book today. I’ve never yet gone on a traveling mission trip, but I want to someday because of his example.

He also had a bit of an ornery streak. As Brenda mentioned in her last vlog, we often butchered meat on the farm. One time, while the adults were busy cutting up and packaging meat, Grandpa snuck away and taught us grandkids how to slide down the tin roof of the shed. Not sure I would be brave enough to do that today, but oh, it was fun! I think that’s where I get my “I’ll do almost anything once” spirit. (Or at least I’ll do it until my jeans snag and rip a large hole in the bottom!) That spirit’s gotten me on ziplines, rollercoasters and through six moves across five states and three time zones.

Both of my grandparents are now gone. I miss them all the time, especially when I think about how Grandpa never met my daughter. He died just three days before she was born. It’s a bittersweet circle of life kind of thing. I hate that I missed his funeral, but as my family was celebrating his life, I was celebrating my daughter’s arrival. She was born on his funeral day, at about the same time as the ceremony.

Families pass down many fun traditions, but what I will always treasure most from my grandparents is their love of life and their dedication to passing that same zest for adventure on to me. My adventure days may be on hold for the moment, but as I recover over the next few months, I’ll be busy planning my next adventure, as soon as I’m back on two feet.