The Travel Journal Filled with Unforgettable Details

 

I wish I could remember how many years we owned a motor home. Less than ten, more than five is my closest guess-imate. We took it on several trips to the Deep South to visit friends, to Texas to a Romance Writer’s Convention and to Iowa, Pennsylvania and Tennessee to many gas station collector’s conventions. We also used it on day trips along Lake Michigan and on camping trips upstate a couple of times. When we traveled Out West, our most frequent destination, we took a pickup truck, leaving the RV home because my husband loved hanging out in the Rocky Mountains on the two tracks they called 'roads' back in those days.

For some of the years we had the motor home I kept a travel journal and yesterday I read through it with the end game in mind of putting it through the shredder afterward. When I finished the last page I decided it was the most boring travel journal ever written and I won’t have any trouble getting rid of it. I hope. It’s still sitting on my computer desk where I used it to pull a few quotes out of it to use as blog fodder. Those of us who keep blogs know how hard it's been to come up topics to write about during the pandemic and while my travel journal isn't insightful or as entertaining as John Steinbeck's Traveling with Charley who wrote about searching for America with his French Poodle as his companion, it's better than reading labels at the supermarket. I used to love doing that, by the way, but with the pandemic we're not encouraged to stick around inside the store any longer than necessary or to touch stuff we're not going to buy. And if you don't know it by now, I follow the Rules of life so don't expect a blog post about the most interesting food labels in aisle eight. Damn pandemic!

In May of 1993 I wrote in the travel journal: Here at Motel Walmart in Fayetteville, TN, Cooper (our dog at the time) thinks he’s died and went to heaven. They’re having a sidewalk sale and every time they call out over the loud speakers “Sidewalk Sale Today!” he only hears the word “walk” which is his favorite word in the English language. As for us, Motel Walmart was noisy last night with our own private security guards chi-chatting on their two-way radios as they watched over the merchandise that employees dragged outside at closing. At 3:00 AM I learned that one of them has an Aunt Betty with a bunion which I related to Don in the morning since he could sleep through anything. (We often stayed overnight in the parking lots of Walmart which wasn’t uncommon for RV travelers back in those days.)

June 5, 1994: We got on the road early with no coffee, no breakfast and me begging Don to get a map and some gas so we didn’t get stranded in the middle of nowhere because we were off to chase another unicorn. On a back road off the interstate---interstates, according to Don, are for people with no adventure in their souls---we stopped at a fruit and produce stand where he claimed the bearded old man wouldn’t give him directions unless he bought a watermelon. Cooper was happy to see it get plunked down on the floor of the motor home. He had a lot fun trying to hump and wrestle the last melon as it rolled back and forth. The old man’s directions were good, though, and we were able to find our destination---a tiny, over-grown and deserted gas station from the good old days of one pump and a Coke-Cola machine out front. It had one of those old screen doors that squeaked when it was opened and it slammed shut with a thud on your way out. It was nailed closed so we couldn't listen for those sounds of our youth. Where is the logic of nailing shut a screen door? If you wanted to break in you could just rip the screen. Don was in photography heaven and I was wishing it was 50 years ago so we could have bought some gas and a bottle of pop, maybe a bag of chips and called it breakfast.

August 15, 1997: This is the year of Don’s fuck-ups. Everything was going fine, great weather and we had lots of time compared to other years headed out to the Iowa Gas convention. Then Don got stubborn about the high cost of gas at the truck stop and that’s when we discovered how few (if any) stations there are between the truck stop and Moline. It was nerve racking on 80 with traffic down to one lane. Getting off the highway, we got lost looking for a station, adding drama we didn’t need---especially since we discovered on this trip that the motor home doesn’t start when it gets over-heated. When we finally found a gas station we had to put 29.30 gallons in our 30 gallon tank. After getting back on the road we developed two bad tires on the driver’s side and we are now sitting in South Amana where we’re waiting for two new tires to get delivered to a Country Bumpkin Gas Station with a one bay service garage. We’re calling this our ‘Grapes of Wrath’ trip.

September 10, 1998: We stayed in a $44 a night Motel 8 in Georgetown north of Lexington, KY. It was okay, no frills but clean and quiet. It was worth it just for the hot showers after three days of sponge baths in the motor home. We ate at a place called “Golden Girls” around mile marker 116 which was great. At least I loved my pork. Don had a t-bone. The national news last night was filled with Ken Starr and the report he just turned over to the House for possible impeachment hearings against Bill Clinton supposedly for perjury, obstruction of justice, witness-tampering and abuse of power.

And probably the most boring travel entry into the journal was the day I wrote: We planned to leave town at noon, but as usual with our trips, we were late. It was 3:00 before we headed up north for a long weekend at the Buckley Steam Engine Show, which they say is the largest show of its kind in the world with 50 thousand plus people going through their gates each of the four days its open. We took our time getting there. 1^st stop: gas $24.82. 2^nd stop: yard sale in Bailey where I picked up another Sterling diner dish. 3^rd stop: the Trade-a-Rama in Grant where we bought two jars of Vidalia onions for $6.00. Around White Cloud Cooper, Don and I sang a couple of versus of All My ex’s Live in Texas. You know Don has reset his body clock to Vacation Time when he and the dog start singing duets. Do we know how to have a good time, or what! ©

All my ex's live in Texas
And Texas is the place I'd dearly love to be
But all my ex's live in Texas
And that's why I hang my hat in Tennessee

 

Photo Note: The photo at the top is not our motor home but it’s close. We had an awning on ours. Below is my favorite travel photo. That's Cooper greeting Punxsutawney Phil. Cooper was fascinated by that statue's butt. He probably thought his nose was broken because he couldn't smell anything. That photo wasn't staged, by the way. He was a great traveler. He took his first trip in the motor home when he was eight weeks old and he played in a dishpan of water all the way from Michigan to Iowa. On the way home we stopped at a beach on Lake Michigan, thinking if he liked splashing water in a pan that he'd love the waves on the big lake but he was scared of them. He had more sense than we did. He didn't even weigh five pounds back then and the undertow would have killed him had he waded in. 

They're Watching Us: Apps and Conspiracy Theories

Last week I was sitting in the dealership’s waiting room while they put new tires on my Chevy Trax when I got an alert on my cell phone. It said that I had three flat tires and I needed to get my car serviced immediately. Spying devices might know a lot of things but they don’t know everything. That alert still cracks me up. 

From where I live I need to drive along a river to get to most of places I have to go. I’ve always feared sliding off the road and being submerged under water and no one would ever know what became of me. I suppose if I did end up underwater some day I'd get a text alert advising me that driving conditions are too wet to be driving. 

The off topic paragraph: (Have you noticed how often I write them?) Anyway, I was telling the service manager when I paid for my tires that I’ll only be back one more time before I’ll have to find another service center and he asked where I was moving. I told him. He handed me his card and said, “We’re down in the area every day. We can pick up your car and deliver it back to you.” We’re talking a distance of over 25 miles. This thirty-something guy always calls me ‘dear’ and sitting in the waiting room on more than one occasion I’ve paid attention to his conversations with other women waiting for their cars and I’ve never heard him call them ‘dear’. What’s up with that? It doesn’t matter, I would never do that---have my car picked up because I’ve seen those young ‘parts chasers’ that work there. When one of them drove my car from the front of the building to the back and he changed my radio station and moved my seat while driving my car a whole 200 feet. If one of those parts chasers took my car on a 50 mile round trip my Chevy would come back pimped out with a cell phone holder sticking to the dashboard, my Bluetooth setting changed and new faux zebra fur seat covers. Front and back.

Recently I got my Google Maps Monthly Timeline Report which told me I had been to 16 places in March, to three cities, drove 135 miles and spent 10 hours in my car. Intrusive? Yes, but think about how handy that would be for a controlling stalker husband or for old people who forget where they’ve been or you turn up missing because your car has been submerged in a river for weeks. I didn’t include how handy it would be for tracking your teenagers because they’d probably know how to turn off the Google app when they go to places that are not parent approved, then turn it back on again when they leave. Still, I hear there are other apps that will give real-time reports. You could be sitting at home in your underwear watching an episode of Fly Fishing in Alaska and your cell could alert you to the fact that your son and his girlfriend are rocking the back seat of your Ford Explorer in the parking lot of Walmart. “Wally World?” you’d grumble, “couldn't they find a more romantic place to park than Wally World?”

Speaking of spying on people I just read an article about the conspiracy theory regarding Bill Gates putting microchip tracking devices in the Covid-19 vaccines that the likes of Roger Stone and the Russian Communist Party had a heavy hand in spreading. It all started from a grain of truth about a study being funded by The Gates Foundation. It has nothing to do with micro-chipping or tracking people but the study is about the use of a special ink that’s being developed that can hold data and potentially be used like an invisible tattoo given at the same time a vaccination is injected. It would act like a digital certification that you’ve been vaccinated and could hold all the same information that we have printed on our vaccine cards. Welcome to the future where you get your temperature taken and an ink reader held up to your arm before being allowed on airplanes, into the Superbowl stadium or mega-large music venues. Fine by me as long as I get to proof-read the info in the ink before they put the invisible tattoo on me. Every time the doctor's office calls in a prescription I try to get them to correct misinformation in my file about which pharmacy to use and half the time they still get it wrong.

Not to fear, they haven't rolled out this technology yet so no one has been marked with an invisible ink tattoo, however the technology to do it is not far off. But reading about it got me to wondering why they don’t just give every vaccinated person a distinctive mark like the scars we got with our smallpox vaccinations. Mine is still visible after nearly 70 years, but I’m guessing pandemic experts don’t want to trust that some dimwit bubbas wouldn’t fake their vaccination scars thus helping to spread every Tom, Dick and Harry virus that comes along. (Not to mention the fact that those smallpox vaccination scars were caused by using live viruses which they don't make anymore.) 

Pandemics are going to be sweeping the earth more and more often, according to world health organizations, for reasons that have to do with human encroachment on nature and global warming and isn’t that just peachy-keen. There goes the lipstick industry as we all hide behind our masks? Do you think I could get a grant to study how young people will adapt to flirting without the use of their mouths? But seriously, I for one, admire Melinda and Bill Gates for using their money to help improve the health, sanitation, water and agriculture in developing countries---helping them helps us all---and for studying and funding solutions for controlling diseases and pandemics around the world. They are true Humanitarians and don't belong of the Enemies List of the Far Right. And that's all I'm going to say about that. ©

 

I didn't know you could make invisible ink this easily or I would have as a kid to keep my brother from reading my diaries. I did have a bottle of invisible ink that came in a spy kit but it got used up rather quickly. So the Gates ink tattoos really fascinate me.

Loss, Love Affairs and Old Movie Lines

One of my Gathering Girls pals has a daughter who volunteers at a place that’s like a food pantry only instead of giving away people food and goods the store-front charity gives away pet foods and gently used pet supplies to people living on the edge of poverty. The idea is to help them keep their dogs and cats from being surrendered to animal shelters. I have not disposed of much of Levi’s stuff---not ready for that emotional roller coaster yet. But that first week after he passed I did, however, drop off everything with an expiration date...food, treats, medications for fleas, ticks and heart worms and water additive for dental care to the above mentioned charity.

Fast forward to now when I just dropped off three baby/pet gates and two dog beds. I know in the long run it would be easier to pull the band-aide off and get rid of all of Levi’s stuff at once, but I can’t seem to do it. Before this turns into a Country/Western song about a girl whose dog died and she lost her pickup truck in a poker game and she feels low enough to do a duet with a whippoorwill, let me say that I haven’t owned a pickup truck since 2002, we don’t have whippoorwills in Michigan and I haven’t played poker since my teens when all I owned of value to lose in a card game was my roller skates, a bike I rarely rode and a bunch of diaries that my best friend and I occasionally used to play Diary Roulette. The key to winning that game was to remember key dates in each other’s daily activities…say when I knew my friend got a phone call from a boy she liked and there was a good chance she’d rambled on in her diary about Harold or Stan or whoever was her current crush. We can’t all have poignant, Anne Frank-type diaries and thank God for that.

Not even in my twenties when I was dating a guy who’s idea of going on a date was to spend Friday nights at his married sister’s house playing card games was poker among the games we played. Those people and their endless, empty-headed chit-chat that went with the card games drove me crazy but that was back in my Be-a-Chameleon days to get a man so we played cards every Friday night for a year. If we hadn’t broken up we’d still be playing cards on Friday nights and there would never had been a Levi in my life because he didn’t think animals belonged inside the house. I dated two guys from farm communities and while I'm not sure if the other one felt the same way about turning animals into household pets, his stick-up-his-butt father surely wouldn't have approved.

Aaron. Ah, yes, that other country boy: Remember the Grant Wood 1930s painting of the gloomy farmer with the pitchfork and his equally gloomy wife? Had we gotten married, that would have been me, living a life where I disappointed my in-laws because I’d never won first prize at the county fair for my apple pie or anything else for the matter. Not much call for an art major on a farm. My lack of interest in all kitchen related activates didn’t put the odds in my favor of marrying a guy in line to inherit the family farm. If I had known that going into that relationship maybe I would turned up my Chameleon Charm and brought his father a few casseroles. But I didn't and one day Aaron took a severe beating from his father when he got a little too dreamy-eyed over having a future with me, "that ‘college girl’ who was unsuited for farm life." Nothing breaks up a sweet, cream-and-sugar romance faster than a few cracked ribs and a lot of black and blue bruises from a leather belt.

He came to see me a couple of days after that beating, before hopping on a bus to Chicago where he’d planned to get a job that didn't involve milking cows and plowing fields. A few weeks later he was back on the farm. His physical wounds had healed but I doubt his spirit ever did. Gone was his sexy smile, his sweet touches and our easy-going banter and laughter. I didn’t see him again for 5-6 years and he introduced me to his perfectly-suited-for-farm-life-and-father-approved wife. If that chance introduction had happened after instead of before the movie, The Way We Were was released I would have quoted Barbara Streisand’s character Katie when she said, “Your girl is lovely, Hubbell.” And after we parted Aaron, like Hubbell with Katie, would have given me a longing, last look from across the street that telegraphed he wished things could have been different while his wife looked like she had a thought bubble drawn over her head that read, Ohmygod, that was HER wasn’t it! 

And maybe it did happen that way. After 50 years memories and imagination tend to blur. All I really know for sure is that life is messy and our summer romance would have made a great country/western song about a guy with a pocket full of regrets who was haunted by his memories of laughing and singing and being silly with a city girl. Or maybe that song would be more along the lines of Garth Brook's Thank God for Unanswered Prayers where a guy and his wife have a chance meeting with a girl he wanted way back when, before he found the true love of his life. 

I don’t even remember Aaron’s last name. It doesn’t matter. He’s a single thread woven into the Tapestry of my Life, a rich tapestry of people and events that sometimes make me wish I'd quit reading romance books and write a couple instead.

And by the way, if you think you're hearing the theme song to The Way We Were about now, you'd be right. That's me singing...  ©

Memories
Light the corners of my mind
Misty watercolor memories
Of the way we were

Scattered pictures
Of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were

Memories
May be beautiful and yet
What's too painful to remember
We simply to choose to forget....