The View From Here: Road Trip

The View From Here: Road Trip
By Ken DeLaat

​“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain

Over the years  my Lifetime Spousal Companion (LSC) Lil and i have been on many travels. South, East, North and many many times West we’ve wandered about  primarily by automobile due to an aversion to flight travel...

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...that has nothing to do with fear of flying.

I’m not even wary of being dragged off the plane although admittedly there have been times when I would have begged to be taken off in any manner possible including parachute due to seating arrangements placing me beside people I pray to never encounter again.

And therein lies the flying thing.

I find airports to be rife with rudity a condition that seems to amp up once on the plane where I seem to find myself part of a tense team of traveling companions most of whom are unknown to each other and will ever remain so.

Fortunately.

There are many airport/airplane stories chronicling encounters with fellow passengers, airline staff, and odd yet humorless characters, as well as way too much time during delays and cancellations spent attempting to pretend I was anywhere else. But we’ll leave those alone for now because when one is about to depart on a road trip and life feels pretty good it’s not karmically advisable to dwell on negative vibes.

So anyway, the car is heading south.

No not the beaches of Florida, not Disney World, and not the Carolina’s where last year LSC Lil nearly caved to one of my perennial “This is where we need to live so let’s go home and sell everything and….”  ravings I thought she had grown immune to over our 4+ decades of travel.

Plans are to meander along  the Mississippi River because...well…. because we talked about it years ago and Lil has been busy so she let me plan the trip and all and I guess because we haven’t done it before.

It starts with a drive to Hannibal Missouri because Mark Twain was a writing genius and Huckleberry Finn just might be The Great American Novel. Nothing much is known about Hannibal and there has not been extensive research done beforehand because I’ve also been a bit busy and once a general destination was decided upon the rest just didn’t get the time it likely deserved.  At any rate we’re planning on spending the weekend there before inching our way south.

Other stops?

I don’t know, it’s a little vague right now which is ideal for a road trip. A journey cutting through the heart of the country without a definite ultimate destination except for (in a week or so) home.

Ok, so it’s not the months we spent living in a van with a Labrador Retriever  named Molly and exploring the west, it’s not the several week crawl through the Keys and its not months living out of our backpacks in Europe (though that trip was more rails than roads). Those were part of another age when time seemed to move at an exceptionally slower pace.

​But it is travel, however brief.

So let the adventures begin.