Babbling About the (Uncertain) Romance of the Road
I love *driving*. But for now, I prefer *having driven.* And I want to tell you everything about it.
I’ve written about this at other online venues during the last few years — apologies to any of you who have (as they say) heard this before. But for you newcomers: The Missus and I (a) retired in 2020 and (b) embarked in mid-2021 on a roughly fourteen-month road trip across the US and back. We started in Florida, headed up to Maine, drove west to Las Vegas, spent a month driving around California, then finally did a sort of two-month wind-sprint back east in Fall, 2022. We had several extended stays with family (including five months in Vegas), and have finally come to rest in what’s called the “Research Triangle” area of North Carolina.
(To say I’m tired would not exaggerate.)
Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed an annoying verbal tic in my everyday conversation: beginning sentences, or otherwise embellishing them, with phrases like “during our trip” and “while on the road” and “while we were in [insert destination].”
In short, I fear I’m turning into one of those old guys propping his feet up on a cracker barrel and hawnking1 tobacco juice into a spittoon while regaling listeners with tales of his adventures in, y’know, The Real But Mythic World — the world which counted, by the gods, not some superficial whippersnapper’s world constrained by the everyday and the immediate.
So I’m going to work to rein in that knee-jerk instinct. But I’m not going to stop thinking about the trip, and maybe trying to make some larger sense out of it… starting soon(ish).
For now, though…
All of this has been triggered by a couple visits from houseguests in the last month. They’re family or close friends, so — in the spirit of such relationships — they have little choice but to listen to whatever we’re spouting. (And vice-versa, I hasten to add.)
Even though they’re houseguests who’ve heard all about the trip, waded through the thousand photographs, endured our presence during visits back east, we still — still! — keep finding reasons to interject gratuitous asides about (say) how much better or worse the weather was on such-and-such day there than it was more recently here, how to game a GPS device when you don’t like its suggestions, the best supermarket chains in various regions of the company, why we liked the local parks in City X better than those in City Y, etc. I often have had to stop myself from jumping in and practically scolding them — Oh nonono, you don’t want to go that way! — when guests talk about their planned routes to get back home from our place. Even just this morning, with only 15 minutes before our latest visitors headed out the door, I forced myself not to run into the living room to cast the travel-planning software screen to our big-screen TV…
It’s embarrassing, and I apologize to any of you who might’ve been subjected to all this since we landed back along the Atlantic seaboard.
That said, I do have to share this one funny story about the little restaurant in Hannibal, Missouri, where… *voice trails off as casual reader wanders away*
I dunno. Neither “hocking” nor “hawking” nor “honking” looks right to me here. “Hawnking” has a much more… onomatopoeic feel to it, somehow.