♪ On the road again ♪

As I write this, I am prepping for my road trip. As you read it, I am in the middle of it. Oh, the joys of scheduling posts.

We had a glitch with the planned road trip from Iowa to Colorado in a rented mini-van full of furniture and other memorabilia: my husband can't go. They had a major shake-up in his office, and he has to remain behind.

I'm fine traveling cross-country alone. Lord knows, I've done it enough times going to and fro, here and there. But as it turns out, we have a family friend (Marcia) whose late husband's cousin lives in Kansas. Said cousin (Pat) has named Marcia her next of kin (Pat is a single lady who taught botany for years and years and years and is now in her 70s and retired).

Marcia feels obligated to make a trek to Kansas now and again to visit Pat. But Marcia is in her mid-70s and to be honest, I don't want her on the highway in the middle of a strange metropolitan area (Kansas City) alone in her SUV.  The last time she visited Pat, I drove to KC to visit my sister, and we put Marcia on a shuttle to Manhattan to visit the cousin. But my sister is moving soon (to about 30 miles away from me), so those Kansas City trips will be much fewer and far between.

Long story short: Marcia will go with me and we'll swing by and visit Pat on the way home. It's a bit out of the way, but no biggie on a trip of this type (1500-2000 miles in 5 or 6 days). She'll pack the bourbon and I'll pack the wine, and we'll be just fine.

I'll report in if I can on how the trip is going -- unless you hear otherwise, assume we're having a good time, laughing and singing and meandering our way across country on our adventure.

J L
(jayellwilson.com)

Getting lost in America

I love traveling, if I can do it by car and have plenty of time for "side tours". I probably developed this love of road trips from the trips my family used to take every summer. My father owned his own business, and he could take off when he wanted. He always took one week with Mom (and they went night-clubbing) and one or two weeks with the family, on road trips. Those "side tours" are what my father called all the times we got lost.

"Let's see what's there. It's a side tour," he'd say and we'd make a right turn, go down a bumpy road, and end up at Willy's Snake Emporium, or The World's Biggest Ball of Gum, or some other roadside oddity. Our trips were never in a straight line, but rather composed of wiggles here and there, as we went from A to B with side tours at C, D, and E.

Every night we would stop at a motel and that motel had to have 2 items: a swimming pool for the kids and a real restaurant for my parents. My parents would fix cocktails and sit by the pool, watching us swim. Then we'd all go eat, then the kids would swim some more before dropping into bed for the night. The next day: more driving and more side tours.

Give me a map, a good car, and a few weeks, and I'll have a lot of fun. In fact, I'll be doing that in a month or so. I'm sure I'll find some side tours along the way.

J L
(new release out! Whee!)