Meandering Around the U.S. by Car
by Car by JOSEPH RITZ
When I tell friends my wife and I just got back from a trip during which we drove 7,411 miles around the country, I get replies like: ��Oh? How many cars did you see from Ohio?�� ��Did I tell you my wife and I took some of her relatives up to Niagara Falls last week end?�� ��How much did you pay for gas once you got out of New York?�� Our trip began conventionally enough on a late fall day with a decision to drive from our home on Lake Erie, near Buffalo to Charleston, S.C., where our oldest son, his wife and two of our grandchildren reside. Several days after our arrival we made a decision that instead of driving home through North Carolina, West Virginia and Pennsylvania the way we had come, we would return to Buffalo via Las Vegas. I mean, as long as we were this far south... I wouldn��t recommend our trip to anyone wanting to get to their destination in a hurry or those aiming to take a direct route to anywhere. (One of our many detours to Las Vegas was one of nearly 900 miles to meet up with our youngest daughter In Colorado where she skis for a living in Vail during cold weather and is a white water rafting guide in the summer.) But if you want to meander around the country, seeing the the arcaded, friendly main streets of places you never heard of you might want to do what we did and leave the Interstate for long stretches of time, particularly when expressway traffic is heavy. Traveling in this manner, we unexpectedly encountered a seven story office building built to look like a picnic basket (outside of Newark, Ohio) and the largest cross in North America (near Jericho in the Texas panhandle). In antebellum Holly Springs, Miss, we ate lunch in ramshackle Phillip��s Grocery which some restaurant guides contend serves the best hamburgers in the U.S. besides selling canned goods, bottled pop and junk food. Nothing fancy here, the juicy but greasy burgers come served warm wrapped in waxed paper. A roll of paper towels in the center of small tables substitutes for napkins. Besides hamburgers, it serves fried green tomatoes and fried okra. Even its pies are fried. Old Highway 66, with its two lanes, abandoned gasoline stations and boarded up motels, is only one of many local roads we took, partly to get a flavor of the small towns in America, the ones too small to have a MacDonalds. For hundreds of miles, we traveled country roads and highways which had stop signs and traffic lights and a yellow line down the center of the road. Why? Because from the interstate you don��t see people working in cotton fields or raking leaves or coming out of a small church with a tall steeple or walking down Main Street pushing a baby carriage filled with brown paper grocery bags. You don��t see young pretty girls in short skirts tossing batons in the air. You��re going too fast to see and talk to the people that live in our vast country. Pretty ordinary people, I grant you. But on any interstate its rare to see a person doing every day things. We also turned off the interstate and took local roads from time to time to avoid tailgating eighteen wheelers as big as Rush Limbaugh which bore down on us at speeds of up to 105 mph. so that on Interstate 40 through parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma we felt as though we were driving in front of a Boeing 747 as it was taking off from an airport runway. The expressways offer fast travel and often take you past some of the most scenic spots in America. I don��t say you should avoid them, but once in a while get off at an exit and drive a few dozen miles on a parallel road. You might have a conversation such as one I had in Brinkley, Ark. where we stopped for my wife to make some purchases at the one drug store. As I waited near the car parked outside, a lean man in his thirties wearing a dress shirt and tie approached the pharmacy. He stopped out of curiosity to say, ��If you��re with that car you��ve come a long way.�� I acknowledged I was and that it was my first time in Arkansas. ��It��s the only one of the fifty states I hadn��t been in until now,�� I informed him. ��Arkansas is your last then,�� he mused. ��Well, that��s appropriate,�� he continued. ��It��s last in everything else.�� That said, he entered the store and Ann, my wife, heard him shout excitedly to the woman clerk that there was a man all the way from New York City standing outside her store. ��No. Buffalo,�� Ann said The clerk turned to her astonished, ��Buffalo! My lordy, that��s even further.�� ### http://jritz.net
