Traveling Around

Johnny Cash sings a line about how he’s going to be “breathing air that ain’t been breathed before” after he leaves his so-called bad-mouth woman. I’m yearning to breath fresh air while wandering around in wide open spaces, too, but not for his reason. Since we can’t move around in public I have places in mind where I will do just that after all the snow melts and mud dries. 

For now I’m reading books to satisfy my needs, and while we haven’t traveled a great deal over the years, we’ve managed to see forty-nine states (not Delaware), so I’m roaming through my travel notes, too. This  one dropped out of a notebook from November of 2012. We were in Waikiki touring Pearl Harbor and rode a navy launch to the USS Arizona Memorial where we spent a few moments in reverent silence.  Since that time in Hawaii, every time we see that Geico commercial with the little green gecko, we remember times in Hawaii’s outdoor cafes when those quick little critters crawled around the railings beside us and watched us eat.

In 2004, we ate in a Basque cafe in the Star Hotel in Elko, Nevada. The Basque culture figured in the sheep herding industry of the West. Besides, they know how to cook a meal - baked chicken for me, lamb for Mary. A few days before Elko, we’d spent time in Vancouver, BC, rode a ferry to Victoria Island and toured the spectacular Butchart Gardens.

I found notes from this trip in January, 2013 when we stopped in Roswell, New Mexico to tour the museum commemorating the supposed crash of the alien spacecraft and concluded it was a hoax to sell tickets to tourists. A couple days later we arrived in Tombstone where Wyatt Earp was big and read from my cafe placemat - “Tombstone Funeral Home. Ask about our layaway plan.”

A trip in 2005 with North Dakota Farmers Union Tours was so good we repeated it in 2010, the Northeast Fall Foliage Tour. The theme of the trip was a bit of a misnomer because the beautiful color of fall leaves was really a secondary attraction. We drove into the heart of cities and historical regions: Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, Gettysburg Battlefield, and Amish communities. In NYC we visited Grant’s Tomb where across the street is the largest Gothic church in the world that’s been now converted into a hospital during this raging pandemic, the Twin Towers, the Statue of Liberty, and so much more.

Then we headed on to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont with its pure democracy style of town meetings to make decisions. Covered bridges, Dartmouth College, the Erie Canal, Niagara Falls all blend into the total tour package. Those two occasions fulfilled a lifetime of yearning to visit those sites.

One other trip comes to mind. We wanted to celebrate our 25th anniversary by doing something big, so in 1999 we boarded a ship for a cruise to Alaska. I’d always wanted to return and Mary had never been there and we came away well satisfied with our experience. The weather was fine, the mosquitoes hadn’t come out yet, and we rode the White Pass railroad born of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897.

One other memory floats to the top. When in Kalispell, Montana we witnessed a tragic emotional scene where a family had gotten word their daughter’s plane had crashed in the nearby forest. It turned out well, though several days later we read a news article reporting she had hiked out of the crash site, battered and bruised but alive.