Road Trip Epiphanies

I've just returned from a three week, nearly 6000 mile road trip to California. Yep, driving all alone, our nation whizzing by me at 70 miles per hour.

When I was younger, I hitchhiked cross-country a few times; when I was at CNN, I either flew or sat in the passenger seat of a car while someone else in our crew (usually the photographer) drove.

But now, in my almost-retirement (I work 8 hours a week, sometimes just online), it's just me at the controls of my vehicle, stopping when and where I please. Talk about exhilirating freedom.

And during these three weeks of driving and visiting with family and friends, I discovered some truths:

1) Nevada, all seven hours of it from east to west, is ugly. Plug ugly.

2) Books-on-tape are a wonderful invention for long distance drivers. I listened to three of them on my journey--The Terrorist by John Updike, Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, and Bridge of Sighs by Robert Russo. Russo's book was enormously long, 21 discs, but it made the time fly by. It even made me forget that Nevada was plug ugly.

3) Long distance driving is a great way to gain weight. Just sit in a seat for 10 hours expending zero calories, and then stop along the way to fill up at greasy diners. The pounds just pile up.

4) Have you taken a look at the calorie totals now being posted at some Starbucks? 450 calories for a scone? Add that to a latte, and your simple, little breakfast snack amounts to half the calories you're allowed for the entire day if you want to lose weight. Good luck on the rest of the day.

5) Farm life might be the way to produce a better, healthier, happier population. I stopped at a farm in Minnesota, and found the family remarkably healthy in their outlook toward the world. Yeah, they worked like hell and they worried about the weather, but they seemed free of much of the clutter and muck that most of us sophisticates have to navigate through every day.

6) Ditto for the Mormons. I stopped in Salt Lake City, wandered a downtown searching in vain for trash or graffitti, and talked to some new arrivals there. Their conclusion? The Mormons work hard, clean up after themselves, take care of their families and communities, and prosper. Sounds like the American dream to me.

7) There's probably no greater happiness in my life than sitting around a fire with my family, consuming a couple bottles of wine, and discussing the state of the world.

8) Karaoke can be therapeutic. Go ahead, laugh. But try it sometime, away from an audience, Just get a hold of one of those machines or buy one--they're pretty cheap--and start singing. Loudly. It allows you to empty your mind, kind of like a noisy meditation.

9) Sun Cities-and I guess there are plenty of them now--are a wonderful place for some retirees. They're clean and safe, and they're loaded with activities, amenities and potential friends, but please...please...never send me there. The homgeneity would kill me. The rules would kill me. I took a walk through one of their impeccably kept neighborhoods and joked to a
resident that it looked like weeds were outlawed. His response? Oh yeah, they are. If someone doesn't keep up his yard, he's reported to authorities and action is taken. Yikes.

That's enough to make me long for the dreary landscape of Nevada.

Falling off the turnip truck

I took a trip downstate this last weekend and found myself in a shopping mall in Troy on Saturday afternoon. I hadn't been to a genuine mall with more than 100 stores and a food court in several months.

It's funny because that used to be a regular part of my suburban life in Atlanta. Now, when I enter these wondrous palaces of commerce and affluence, I feel like a country bumpkin.

My first taste of "otherness" came in Nordstroms. Fancy stuff, big prices. I stopped at a rack full of shirts, touched the fabric on one of them--a nice garment--and searched in vain for the price. A most efficient gentlemen came over, glanced at my appearance--my well-worn 30 dollar jeans, my 12 dollar shirt from Walmart, my slightly muddied shoes, my unkempt hair--and informed me, barely hiding his contempt, that this lovely shirt on the rack retailed for 165 dollars.

I thanked him and moved on, calculating in my head that I could buy 13 Walmart shirts for the price of that one garment, and I'd still have money left over to buy a latte.

Speaking of which, I found the Starbucks next. Is there a mall anywhere on earth that doesn't have a Starbucks? In any case, I arrived there and found that the line went out the door. Twenty people in front of me awaiting their special cup of 4 and 5 dollar coffee.

The entire mall, in fact, was filled with shoppers, most of them loaded down with bags of recently bought goods. This, in a suburb of Detroit which the rest of the nation has come to regard as the center of a near economic depression.

Sure didn't look that way to me. Shoppers looked happy and prosperous.

The most astounding sight was the Apple Store. It was absolutely jammed with shoppers trying out and buying the latest in iPads, iPods, iPhones, and iDon't know what else. I felt like I was at a crowded party, forging a path for myself between shoppers, and constantly saying, "Excuse me...Excuse me..."

One other remarkable phenomenon about this mall: nary a book store. Apparently they don't exist in malls anymore. Talk about a sign of the times--Apple is thriving, book stores don't exist.

So after 90 minutes of window shopping and sipping my 4 dollar latte, this country bumpkin, emptyhanded, left the mall and headed back to the UP.

Yeah, I had felt out of place, but I was also relieved at what I saw. It looked like my fellow Americans had regained their confidence and their need to buy and consume.

Me? I kinda like my 12 dollar shirt.

In touch with the world

I had a couple of free hours at Chicago O'Hare on my way back from Arizona a few days ago, and decided to put the time to good use.

I counted how many people at the airport were either on their phones or their computers.

Among those sitting down, it was almost exactly half. Among those walking, about one in eight were on their phones.

Compare that to ten years ago, or better yet, twenty years ago. No comparison. Twenty years ago, virtually all of us were calling on pay phones; ten years ago, most of us still relied on pay phones. I don't know if those banks of pay phones even exist at most airports these days.

I'm one of those who's been critical of the cell phone and computer age, simply because so many of us (in particular, the younger generation) are substituting time with an electronic implement for actual face-to-face encounters and conversations.

Have you ever seen someone busily engaged in a phone coversation arrive at a social occasion and proceed to ignore the people at the party? And worse yet, stay on the phone or make other calls while the party continues? Incredibly rude.

My feeling is, if that conversation with that person is so important, go see that person or at the very least, leave the other people whom you're ignoring so they don't have to listen to your one-sided phone conversation.

But these people at the airport with their phones and computers? That's different. For most of us, time waiting at the airport is lost time, wasted time, so if you can actually put that time to use with communication, work, or even entertainment, you're better off. For this, I salute our new, revolutionary, omnipresent technology.

As for me, however, I was the guy sprawled out in a chair in the corner, alternately reading the New York Times and a paperback book, while sipping my Starbucks latte. It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks.