Roll down the windows and drive

What happened to May? It’s all but gone with the wind. Slow as I am, I was just getting used to the idea that it was finally springtime and all of a sudden up popped Memorial Day, and dagnabbit, Sunday it will already be June.

(I’m not sure if dagnabbit is a real word, but I grew up with Yosemite Sam and Gabby Hayes, so that “oldcootism” gets blurted out sometimes.)

Anyway, besides Father’s Day and Flag Day, June is Fight-the-Filthy Fly Month, Ragweed Control Month, and National Accordion Awareness Month, which probably explains why a lot of people go on vacation in June, and that includes yours truly. Every summer, I have a yen to jump in the car and be like Tod and Buz in the sixties TV show Route 66, driving cross country in their Corvette and having adventures.

I’m regrettably shy of a Corvette, but do I keep my Toyota pony all saddled and spurred, and although I don’t have a plastic Jesus, I do have a Día de Muertos bobble-head figurine on the dashboard of my car, so all is good.

I don’t know what it is about long car trips. On the one hand, a road trip is exciting and adventurous, but on the other hand, it’s draining and sometimes scary, and you need another week of vacation to recuperate from your vacation.

The one scary thing about a long road trip is heavy traffic on an unfamiliar stretch of highway, and I’m mainly talking about the abundance of big ol’ Kenworths, Freightliners and Peterbilts.

There are at least three carved-in-granite rules of the road that I have come to learn.

When you’re getting ready to pass a semi, another car suddenly appears in the left lane and you can’t pass until the other vehicle does so.

When you are able to pass a row of semis, thinking you’ll have a clear road ahead, you immediately are behind another row of semis.

When you are in an unfamiliar city, the green overhead highway signs for which lane to get into are blocked by a semi in front of you.

And have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

That said, there are some unique things to see if you’re paying attention, and diversions like scenic overlooks and historical markers along the road. I heard a John Hiatt song once where he sang about driving his daughter to college from Nashville to Colorado, marveling at the great expanse of the American continent, and somehow worked in the names Ward Bond and Rowdy Yates. Being raised on TV westerns in the 50s and 60s, I totally get the reference to show Wagon Train, a must-see for me every Wednesday night back then.

When racing across the high plains at 70 miles an hour, your mind wanders to the 1800s and tries to imagine how tough it was for those wagon trains and cattle drives. That’s when I realized what a pampered lot we are nowadays, what with not only our cell phones and GPS fallbacks but also rest areas, truck stops, and the siren call of fast food.

We can stop and sleep at motels with clean sheets and lie our heads on soft pillows. I sometimes wonder how many different people have slept on those same pillows and wonder if other people’s dreams get mixed in with mine or if I am dreaming someone’s leftover dream.

You also try to eat well on the road but it seems to always come back to a can of Pringles, an overpriced bag of beef jerky or a sandwich packaged in a plastic triangle, and even though you start out planning to have an extra bag handy for trash there’s a mess of crumbs and wrappers all over the front seat. As well as the front of your shirt, even though you think you’re being careful not to make a mess, but every time you get out for at a rest stop you have to shake the crumbs off your front.

And forget about the back seat floorboards. After a few hundred miles, things just get flung back there.

All kidding aside, I‘ve always enjoyed traveling. Who knows, in an alternate universe, I have been a travel writer, hitting the road for months at a time, visiting exotic places, meeting unusual people, and then writing about them.

If you, like myself, feel the need to get away from it all and hit the road this June, turn off the news and crank up the old song “Roll Down the Windows and Drive” by the Floating Men:

We can stay and be slaves

To our beepers and phones

Or we can roll down the windows and drive …