I suppose it is truly spring. My car's windshield is spattered with bug smears, the roof with bird shit.
Is it weird that I mumble "Toto, I don't think we are in Kansas anymore" every time I cross out of Kansas? I also have a compulsion to reach my hand forward to make sure I am the first in the car to get back into Indiana, even when I'm alone in the car. Look, you may think it strange, I find it amusing. Since I alone am arbiter of taste and humor around here I say it is right and good. And so it is.
I wish I had tucked a cigar into my briefcase. It is a fine day and I would not mind sitting outside the hotel stinking up the place. Instead, I will read a little more of my Louis L'Amour short story collection and then walk across the street for a cold beer and some BBQ.
I have spent more than two decades as a road warrior. I am visiting towns and cities that have not been on my path in the past. That is kind of cool. I used to keep an old atlas with every town I made a business stop or stayed in a hotel highlighted. If I still did that the map of the states would look like a kid had mistaken the Atlas for a coloring book and had gone wild with the yellow markers.
7 comments:
Just finished another road trip a short one compared to yours. I do have to go through Myrtle Beach SC to get to my destination. Myrtle Beach where all the people who got their drivers license from a cracker jack box seem to migrate in the spring and summer.
JOG
Any road trip sucks. Living out of a suitcase in endless interchangeable hotel rooms, eating alone, is not the fun most people imagine.
You have to find the one thing that makes the trip worthwhile. Driving through a Dodge City as I did a couple of months ago, or seeing Fort Leavenworth as I did today makes it worthwhile.
You know from the military what travel is -- even better than I do.
For 20 years, when crossing back from Ohio into Indiana on I-70, I've sung "Back Home Again In Indiana." (When my wife is not with me, I call her just before I hit the line so she can enjoy my dulcet voice.) I don't do that on any other trip, just when I cross back in on I-70.
Tradition!
(Then there was the time when I crossed into MD from PA and the radio was playing "Freebird". I thought that rather ironic, given that I was entering the so-called "Free State", otherwise known as the People's Republic of Maryland.)
I too occasionally belt out a chorus of Back Home Again, in my best Jim Neighbors voice. But not every time.
As a kid, every out of state trip was ended crossing back into Indiana with our Mom crooning Back Home Again... I wish I'd made a recording of it to play on my return trips from out of state. Recently my four siblings and I visited our aunt and uncle in Paducah. Spontaneously, as if on cue, we all broke into a rousing BHAII as a trbute to our mom who has been gone for 6 years. It wasn't tuneful but it felt great.
Nice
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