I picked up “Blue Highways,” which I’d never read, when Mary suggested we might go somewhere sometime, hoping that it might provide some clues, for, indeed, when it comes to going on the road, unless the siren call is extremely seductive, I’d rather read about adventures than have them.
There’s that Canada train. We could go on that. Caribbean cruises lost their allure when I read about one of them having become a gigantic, floating cesspool. My father, who was there in World War II, said to stay out of the Far East — too many inscrutable diseases. And the Middle East goes without saying.
There is New Zealand, but when I asked Frank Russell why he left, he said he’d gotten tired of hearing everyone cloyingly say how wonderful everything was there.
A high school basketball coach once told me Denmark had the prettiest women and the best coffee in the world, and so he moved there . . . from Rye, I think it was.
But I’ve already got a pretty woman as a constant companion, and our coffee, while a blend of Eight O’Clock caf and decaf, is tasty. Alas, I’ll not be able to drink any of it for the next 24-plus hours because I’ve got a stress test to undergo tomorrow, which is interesting inasmuch as Mary’s been under a lot more stress than I have lately, one of her stressors stemming from the fact that her car died not long ago near Two Trees Stables, which probably explains why she’d like to go somewhere, anywhere. And soon.
I keep reminding her that “we’ll always have the Wyndham Greencastle Super 8,” but she’s not amused.
It is true, though. With her conversing I forget all time — and where it is we happen to be for that matter. I think I tend to remember places more for what I’m reading at the time than the sights: “The Last Puritan” in Bangkok, “The Stones of Florence” in Giza, or “Far From the Madding Crowd” in Delhi, for instance.
I know, I know, I must act. As soon as I’ve gone around the country’s back roads in the company of William Least Heat-Moon.