TRAVELING BY CAR ACROSS THE U.S.

OK, so my "out of commission for a few days" turned out to be almost four weeks.  Sorry about that.

We did spend several weeks traveling from Colorado to Las Vegas, NV to Phoenix, AZ to Walkersville, MD, and that kept me from adding to my blog.  Aside from the time spent traveling, I failed to take into account how much time I would spend tending to other matters upon my return home: unloading the car, putting things away, yard work, garden work, getting caught up on local news from the neighbors, and so on.

Everything we had carefully packed in the car when we left the ranch in Colorado had to be unloaded and we had to put all of it away somewhere in the house.  Garbage couldn’t be picked up until I called the waste disposal people and let them know we were back in town; the same with newspaper delivery.  We had to stop by the post office to get our accumulated mail that the postman had been saving since we asked him to stop forwarding it and to ask that our regular mail delivery start again.  There was no food in the house, so grocery shopping was high on the list of things to do first.  And so it went.  Everywhere we turned we came up with another "do me first" job.

The lad I had hired to do the lawn had not kept up with the mowing because of the multiple rains they had in our area this summer, so the grass was way too long.  When I finally got to it (the first dry day) I had to stop repeatedly to empty the grass catcher.  A job that usually took 45 minutes or so took over an hour and a half! 

On to the garden.  Some of the weeds there had developed stems over one inch thick -- and an attitude.  It takes a brave man to tackle weeds that big.  They are tough and stubborn – and resist being pulled from the ground with, literally, every fiber of their being.  (I should apologize for the pun but, actually, I’m rather proud of it.)

But that’s enough about my home chores.  The title of this piece is about car travel and I want to tell you about our travels … by car.

Car travel for many of us conjures up those days from our youth when we sat strapped in the back seat of the family car and whined – because that was the only thing that would get out parents’ attention – “Are we there yet?”  Our parents played silly games with us to keep our minds off our leg cramps and numb butts, or our endless need to pee.  The games worked for a while, but we really wanted to get out of the car and move around.  Car travel was not our favorite mode of travel.

Planes and trains are nice.  Planes get you there faster.  On trains, at least, you can move around a little.  But cars?  Too slow.

Well if you have vertigo, as I have, or claustrophobia, as my wife does, plane travel is out of the question.  Besides, we have learned to relax and enjoy the countryside we are traveling through.  Car travel allows us to do that.

All that being said, we find that car travel offers additional things that other forms of transportation do not.  We could stop when and where we wanted, for one thing.  When we saw a road sign, country market or anything else that caught out attention, we could pull over and investigate it.  We stopped in Kansas, for instance, when we saw one of those brown government information signs that said “Pawnee Village.”  We looked at each other, nodded our heads and made a quick decision to check it out.  Eight miles down the road, we came to a museum constructed where archeologists had unearthed a Pawnee village.  The museum building was over just one of the villages large, domed shelters.  Since we were the only ones there, we got a special one-man tour from the interpreter-guide on duty.

Alas, I am out of time and space.  More on some of the special aspects of our drive across country in the next blog.  I try to keep these personal accounts brief so you don't get bored (well, too bored) reading them.