Road trip

This is my first week back from vacation. I had a wonderful time with very little slack time and got to cap it off with a day of driving alone with Mary. One of the great joys of my life is a road trip wit da Mare.

She caught up on sleep a bit and then I caught a bit o’ nap. Then we listened to a Michael J. Fox book about living with Parkinson’s. Not too many crazies shared the roads with us, the truck ran smoothly and the kayaks stayed right where they belonged, strapped to the rack. And the weather was just fine.

I’d made the trip down the week before all by my lonesome, which turned out to be just what I needed to wind down from all the travel for teaching I’d done the previous three weeks. Fifteen hours of fairly relaxed driving, books on CD and MY music put me right in my comfort zone.

We need to take more road trips now that the goyls are out of the house semi-permanently. I’m not discounting the time I actually spent in California with family and friends - that was all great. I’ll use those experiences as grist for blogs yet to come. But the drive is a really special part that I want to do much more often.

Okay, I can’t hold off any longer! This whole preamble was designed to lull you into submission so you’d be sucked into reading yet another of my lists. Sorry! Well, not that sorry.

Places I’d like to include on road trips with Mary (or whoever agrees to go if she doesn’t):

·         Timothy Lake for the kayaking and the view

·         Yellowstone

·         Another Ball of Twine tour, to include Ohio, Boston, Orlando, Venice Fl, and California

·         New England

·         The Olympic Peninsula, particularly the Ho Forest

·         The coast route to Monterrey

·         Glacier National Park

·         The AlCan Highway

·         The Trans-Canada

·         White Horse

·         The length of the Columbia River

·         Zion Nat’l Monument

·         The Wisconsin Dells (the water part, not the built up tourist part)

·         Traverse City, MI

·         Oto, Iowa

·         Ireland

·         Amish country

·         Berea, Kentucky

·         And some other places