By the time this newspaper hits the streets, myself, my wife, my daughter (age 3) and my son (age 11 months) will be on our way – driving 2,000 miles to Canada for a month-long working vacation.

It’s basically the same kind of situation that was the premise of National Lampoon’s Vacation, a 1983 comedy that starred Chevy Chase and showed how hilarious things can get when a family piles into the car and hits the open road.

This movie came out the year that I graduated from high school and my friends and I thought it was really funny. I bet we watched it 20 times.

Perhaps on some subliminal level, I’m curious to find out how hilarious a real life road trip family vacation will be compared to Hollywood’s interpretation.

My wife and I hatched this hare-brained scheme while sitting in a Dairy Queen last summer.

We were trying to figure out a way to spend some time with her family, who live in Canada. Since I met my wife, travel has always been a difficult obstacle for us. We’ve had some pretty awful experiences with travel by air and the cost of airfare for a family of four traveling from San Antonio to Timmins, Ontario is pretty steep, so we were looking for an alternative.

Somehow the idea of driving to Canada occurred to us.

Even as high as gas prices are right now, it is still a great deal less expensive for a family of four to drive instead of fly. Also, we won’t have the expense of car rental while we’re there.

After crunching the numbers, we figured out we could save more than $2,000 by driving.

In the past, the problem with the idea of driving has been that it was pretty much impossible to be away from work for more than a week.

We thought, well, maybe we can manage being away for two weeks, but if we spent four days driving up there and four days driving back, we would only have six days with her family.

Crossing a fairly large chunk of North America seemed like a great deal of effort and expense for such a short visit.

But then we thought of another idea.

Why not work while we are on the road and while we are at my wife’s parents’ home in Canada?

In the past, this would have been impossible, but with advances in technology – it’s now doable.

Our newspaper pages are now digital, which means it’s not necessary for me to be in Karnes City to paste them down like we once did.

The pages can fly through cyberspace from places like Springfield, Chicago, Grand Rapids or even from Timmins, Ontario, Canada.

Anywhere that has electricity, Internet service and telephone service can now become an office.

Modern technology is truly amazing sometimes.

So we said, "Why not?"

And so the plan was made.

Life has taught me that sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

We’ll see.

We may be crazy.

My wife and I have done some things that others have called crazy…

You know what?

It hasn’t worked out too bad.

If you want to come along with us, you are welcome to share in our adventure.

We will be posting commentary and photos from our cross-country odyssey on a travel blog at www.thecountywide.com/travelblog.htm.

We hope to update the travel blog daily, but who knows what lies in store for us.

We’ll let you know.