A summer of soul

School is back in session this week for my sons, and I imagine what will come up is the question second only to “What’s for lunch?”

“What did you do this summer?”

I hope their answer is simple:

“I grew.”

We went Clark Griswold this summer.

The five of us piled into a van and headed out for the Great West.

Great ambitions fueled us while great tunes filled us, from Bob Seger’s “Roll Me Away” to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.” We plucked John Denver when we hit the mountains, and dialed up JD Eicher for a little hometown flavor.

For sights and sounds, it certainly was the “trip of a lifetime” that many of us talk about.

But what the trip was for self and soul is what I’ll talk about most.

And that’s what I hope the boys, when talking about what they did this summer, talk about most: what they felt, proved and became; not what they saw.

For the record, here is our path to at least frame our Griswold venture:

We overnighted 15 hours down the road in Tulsa, with just a small stop at the St. Louis arch. It was then 10 hours to our first destination of Santa Fe.

From there, we spent 10 days discovering an American tapestry thousands of years in the making:

Santa Fe, Taos, Los Alamos, Grand Canyon, Utah, Durango, Silverton, Nebraska sandhills ... then home.

In total, it was 14 days touching 13 states and just one flat tire.

But the hundreds of footsteps in between are steps and lessons to last a lifetime.

It includes: Standing on a corner in Winslow, Ariz.; painting cars at Cadillac Ranch; snow cones with Navajos; playing lawn jarts with strangers; Route 66 roadside motels; families from Denmark, Italy and Sweden; canyon rappelling; and so much more.

We traveled via the gospel according to tripadvisor.com, and fell in love with the smartphone app Waze to help us with traffic flows (and possibly police radar checks).

With that, here are the life lessons:

Get off the beaten path

We embarked with really only Days 1 & 2 and Days 9 & 10 planned. The middle included the Grand Canyon and some other things. But it was mostly bumping into great things and great people, and letting the road guide us. (Even our hotels were booked on the fly, and it worked out — mostly.)

I told the boys the unknown could be the coolest part of our trip. And it was.

We are a family who collects and plays 1970s lawn jarts. Relaxing under the St. Louis arch, I played a set with a guy from Arkansas just because we could. He never played them before, and he parted with a great smile.

We found on our route Winslow, Ariz., where, in the 1970s, a girl in a flatbed Ford slowed down to take a look at The Eagles’ Glenn Frey, and it became the song “Take it Easy.”

Or so we thought. That corner sees up to 1,000 people a day, and the lady at a gift store there scolded me: “It was Jackson Browne.”

She then whipped out her iPhone to show me pictures of her and Browne. He visited the corner in 2013, three decades after his first visit. The song is mostly his, with Frey adding just the flatbed Ford line.

In Amarillo, we pulled off at Cadillac Ranch, a Texas landmark since the 1970s that was made iconic by Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 song. In Arizona, we found the petrified forest and the huge crater.

Man is small

We brim daily with our needs and wants, and get lost in our life of “just press play and everything starts over again.”

While the latter is certainly true of our lives today, excessive needs and wants is a selfish reality of just being human — today and through our centuries.

Then you see the great West, and you realize we are really small and insignificant in so many ways.

It’s humbling to sit on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or at the Utah arches, or drive Monument Valley, and see that none of it needed human help.

Man is large

John Powell was a one-armed war vet in 1869, and Emery and Ellsworth Kolb were photographers in 1901. But each set out in ways unfathomable for their eras to study, record and, ultimately, share the Grand Canyon.

Mormons answered a church call in 1878 to establish a community in an unsettled area of southeast Utah. Their 125-mile, six-week trek actually lasted 260 miles and six months, and is viewed as the most formidable wagon excursion ever in North America, but they made it, and Bluff, Utah, exists today.

Los Alamos arguably exists as an example of man at his strongest — and most lethal. The ethical debate continues today over the 1945 bombs built there that crushed Japan and ended World War II. When you walk Los Alamos, you are emboldened by what we can do, but also frightened.

Great people in many places

We pulled off to a roadside Navajo stand and spent the next 45 minutes listening and talking to the great vendors there. They wouldn’t let me film them talking Navajo, but we were allowed to listen.

Breakfast with a lady in Santa Fe directed us to places we never would have found.

The dollars pinned on Sonny Spruce’s wall in his 15-foot-by-30-foot Taos Pueblo shop span the world and could possibly fund a college education. And he can pleasantly tell you a story about so many of them. The sun-fed wrinkles on his face seem to create 30 smiles from just his one.

Our cabin host in the Durango mountains lived in Berkeley in the ’60s, moved to a commune later, and greeted us with great oatmeal cookies and greater stories.

You can be more

The hundreds of steps above can fuel such a thought to be more — from the Cadillac Ranch founders, to the Mormons, to the scientists at Los Alamos to even Glenn Frey, er, Jackson Browne.

But you still want to touch it on your own, and for us, that came with Jared Berrett and his Four Corners Adventures.

If you’re to go West at all, find Jared in Blanding, Utah, and let your kids disappear with him into the Utah canyons for a day.

They’ll come out hours later, but will be years older. While the opening 50-foot rappel can bring a wife to tears (I cannot confirm that happened to my wife), they’ll be tears of joy, I would imagine.

So what did we do this summer?

Well, we saw the Grand Canyon, the Taos Pueblo, the Rockies and a few other postcard places.

But what we became was so much more.

(Friend me on Facebook if you have interest in photos of any of these discoveries. And our roadmap is shareable for 2015 travels.)

Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on vindy.com. Tweet him, too, at @tfranko.