Road Trips

I love road trips. Not just any road trip. No sirree. Going to the store, driving to work, is not considered a road trip, at least for me. Though I have had times when just getting out on the road for a few hours has provided me some solace. As long as I am not sitting in traffic.

Now I’m sure if you asked my siblings they may have other remembrances of our family road trips. And if you were to ask our mother, you would definitely get a different response. If memory hasn’t failed me, she did the packing. For all of us. Our dad included. Many a story could be told concerning the preparation for our families road trips. Perhaps a tale for another day.

The only things I remember taking with me was comic books and flash cards. (Not counting my pet salamander I took one year… ask my mother. She will retell the story leaving out no detail.)

Two things I must explain about road trips in the family car.

#1 No air conditioning.

#2 Only an AM radio. (Like cellphones today, once out of the area, signal was lost.)

To compensate for no air conditioning we’d roll the windows down.

To fix the radio problem, we sang. Home on the Range, Casey Jones, Old Dan Tucker… any and every song my Dad or Mom could remember. And if my Dad couldn’t remember the lyrics… he made them up.

Hence, though I now have AM/FM, iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, CD’s… (you name it, I bought it), to this day I still enjoy singing, without the radio on. Just ask my grandkids.