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THE NIGHT BEFORE our four-day road trip from Seattle down the Oregon coast, I figure it's a good idea to check in with Grandma, make sure she's still excited about our little bonding journey, make sure she's still alive. Grandma is 94 years old.

So I slip in the back door of her retirement home and ride the quiet elevator to Room 304.

Knock, knock, kno—"Come in!"

She sounds like she's right behind the door.

I push into the studio she keeps at just under 900 degrees and there she is: Vera Hansen, longtime waitress, bricklayer's widow, hater of pills, lover of travel, 100 pounds of wheelchair–bound feistiness. (The nerves in her legs have stopped automatically responding to the cues from her brain.) She smiles big, and her blue–green eyes disappear behind folds of pearly British skin. Her fingernails shine with a new coat of ruby–red polish.

Grandma is so close to the door that I nearly kick her when I step in. Has she been waiting there all afternoon?

"You ready to go, Grandma?" I joke.

"Not for good," she assures me.

Grandma has always been a traveler. In 1963, she and Grandpa bought their first travel trailer, and by 1970 they had moved into a mobile–home park, upgraded to an Airstream, and would spend the next 15 years towing it all over North America behind a Ford pickup. They were real professionals, the types who put a Christmas tree on the trailer's tongue every December. Polar bear watching in Canada… water–skiing in Mexico… Grandma considers her Airstream years among the best of her life. She's been talking so much about how she's going to show her grandson the art of two–lane travel that the nurses say she's annoying the other nonagenarians. She's even gone so far as to try to rent them the fold–out bed in our RV ($50 a day; no takers). Indeed, Grandma is a great talker but not such a good listener, which is why I think this trip will be so cool. We'll have some quality–time conversations about a topic we both enjoy: how to road–trip right.

"Let's be naughty," she says, shaking a bottle of syrah and giggling. "I think there's a corkscrew in there." She points to the closet that keeps her calendar of naked firemen and other essentials.

"Grandma, I think we need to nail down some details first," I say, and begin explaining what time I'll pick up the rental RV, where her caretaker will sleep, where we might stop, etc.

"We'll take it day by day," she interrupts, as if any other approach—one involving guidebooks, say—were completely, utterly preposterous. And that's that. I love my grandma.