When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
I quit my job in November of 2021. OK, to be honest, I retired. I hate that word. My father liked to joke about “retiring to a pine box.” That’s pretty much what he did, and I planned to do the same. Retiring was for old people, and mom taught me that being in denial about your age is a good thing. More than once she made me dig out a copy of her birth certificate and do the math to prove I wasn’t adding a few decades to her age. She managed to stay alive, alert, and young at heart for 102 years.
I had reasons. A cancer diagnosis and other health issues last year drove home the point that in a few years I might not be eager or able to hit the road and play vagabond . But there’s no doubt that part of what drove me to quit was what felt like a magnetic, gravitational, or supernatural force compelling me Westward and Southward from my Vermont home.
I started spending time looking at travel times on Google Maps, exploring Jane and Michael Stern’s roadfood.com for quirky, cheap restaurants, and browsing the American oddities on Atlas Obscura. I began fantasizing about some of the things I’d like to see and some of the places and old friends I missed. I wanted to visit my kid 1 in New Orleans, and family in Minnesota.
I’d been reading about Cahokia, a mysterious ancient city near St. Louis. And I wanted to visit the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville: a quirky collection of microcars and other motorized oddities. My fantasies turned into a list. The list turned into a spreadsheet.
I asked my sweetie Joanna to join me. She could see that this was about my own fantasies and nostalgia rather than something we could share. “How about you fly out to meet me in New Orleans?” “I can add Colorado to the trip… we can explore the Rockies together.” “How about you fly in for a weekend any place in the whole country?” No dice; COVID was raging and she wasn’t interested in air travel. She suggested we drive to Minnesota together for Thanksgiving. We could visit her son and future daughter-in-law (as well as some of my family). She would fly back to Vermont leaving me to wander off in pursuit of whatever the heck I was pursuing. I jumped at the chance. She bought me a road atlas for my birthday.
We would drive across Ontario. COVID restrictions had locked us out of Canada, a place we loved to visit, but the country had just opened the border for vaccinated Americans. This meant we could avoid the great American rust belt and visit the Great Lakes and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The only risk was the weather: in 2020 we took that route and drove through a nightmarish winter storm.
My spreadsheet grew to include travel times and arrival and departure dates. After Thanksgiving I would head down the Mississippi Valley, mostly following Highway 51. This was the road immortalized by Bob Dylan that runs from near Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota to New Orleans. I set a few basic rules: I would drive no more than 5 hours and strive to get in an hour of walking or other exercise each day. I would keep an eye on the weather and keep my schedule flexible, avoiding any winter storms.
And off you go…