Travel Notes

After being home a week, I realize I’d much rather spend hours on a highway than minutes stuck in traffic. The kids have gotten used to long car trips, and I enjoy daydreaming the hours away. Maybe I should have been a trucker. I like the way it always rains when we cross the Ozarks, the distinctive change in the dirt to the red earth of Oklahoma, the way as soon as you cross into Michigan from Indiana, the air smells of pine trees. We get to see things like rain falling in a column in the distance, windmill farms eerily lit up at night, and lots of billboards for lawyers anxious to help victims of the oil spill. So if I get cancer I know whom to call.

I have also noticed that where there are a lot of casinos, there are also a lot of pawn shops.

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Fixing the a/c in the GMC was not a cheap repair.  Just when you get the thing paid off...

But I have not replaced the broken DVD player.  Keeping the kids happy on the road became easier when we picked up a little DVD player a number of years ago. I felt like a sell-out when we got it, so I inflicted rules like equal amounts of time have to be spent in reading as spent watching movies. When I’m driving solo, I can’t entertain, so it does come in handy. But now we own a number of movies I have never seen all the way through. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is one. Great music to listen to while driving. I should make the kids read the book.

When the DVD player malfunctioned early on our last day of driving, the kids had just finished watching the mini-cd of their dad reading some books – part of a great program sponsored by the USO. They videorecord the service member reading, and then through donations, give the service member the CD and the books he read to mail to his children. Fun for all.  It seemed to hold them over for the rest of the trip - or else they were just too tired to complain.

They were also able to enjoy the fruits of reading earlier in the trip. Barnes and Noble has a reading program for kindergarten – 6th grade kids: Read 8 books, fill out a form asking for title, author, and setting, and get a free book from the list of choices for the readers grade level. Easy free books - one of the kids read the 8 books on the first leg of the trip. But of course, it’s hard to walk out of Barnes and Noble without buying something else.

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In one southern state, we passed a building that claimed to be a “Baptist Temple” but it was made of corrugated steel. No cross, plain rectangle shape. It could have been an auto parts shop or a warehouse. I imagine the people who go to that church take an indignant stance against the human labor and money that go into building cathedrals. I’ve heard more than one rant about the waste of money on big beautiful churches, but happily there’s been a resurgence in building them, thanks in some part due to one of my husband’s former professors, Duncan Stroik, who designed my cousins' church in Kentucky. I wonder if its baldacchino mystified some members who used to worship in a little brick hall of a church. But who isn’t moved to thoughts of awe in such a place?

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Perhaps we’ve spent too many hours on the road when my six year old says things like, “Guess what kind of house I want when I grow up?” His sister guessed “Castle? Mansion? Lake House?” All wrong. He wants: “A camper! I’m going to invent a robot driver so I can go to the bathroom whenever I want.”

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One of my favorite parts of coming home is going through the mail that accumulated while we were out. We picked up our box yesterday. Several personal notes and birthday cards, several magazines, and lots and lots of junk. I like to get all the junk mail at once because it is easier for me to throw it away without opening and saving address stickers. But what about these people who send money in hopes of receiving more money? So I did look through some of the junk, one interesting piece being an offer for a free issue of Laphams, a new magazine focused on history and made up primarily of excerpts from original sources.  Looks interesting. But the advertisement mentioned how people a generation ago used to buy the Britannica collection of Great Books or the Harvard Classics and never read them.  Hmmm. I have both those collections, and never read them. But in college I did read a lot of the titles in paperback editions... maybe I don't need the magazine.