Road Trips
Road trips were a big thing for us, especially as the kids were growing up, and we’re now talking about maybe taking one again when COVID hell has thoroughly relinquished its icy grip. Maybe in the fall. We miss Maine after all the trips there to vacation with friends, see family and visit the girl kid who went to college up there, so we’re thinking that might be fun to go up there again. We still have family in Brunswick we would love to see.
Road trips in our married life have been memorable sometimes in odd ways, so we are thinking of maybe making this one extended. See my sister and her husband in Rochester, revisit the New Hampshire family vacation stomping grounds and then on to Portland and cruise up the Maine coast maybe as far as Bar Harbor. A good way to celebrate being released from COVID quarantine after a year.
Flashbacks of road trip highlights now jump to mind. The rental car that crapped out in Columbus on the first leg of a Nashville trip. This was prior to cell phones, so we hitched a ride with a check-runner from Cleveland to the airport to get another car. No one was stopping to help this distressed family out in the barren wilderness of suburban Columbus, until this exceedingly nice guy did.
I jumped in the front seat with the check-runner and the family and all our gear piled into the back of his pick-up camper with boxes of checks for delivery to Columbus banks. The boy kid eerily started humming the catchy dueling banjos tune from the movie “Deliverance” and making chain-saw sounds under his breath.
We had to make his bank deliveries first in a variety of neighborhoods, so it took us well over an hour to reach the Columbus airport. We gave the guy a stupidly extravagant stipend, as he really did save our lives. The rental folks were a little miffed that we had left their car by the side of the highway, but gave us a workable car nonetheless.
Then there was the crummy cheap motel outside of Cincinnati with no air conditioning or water pressure on a 90 degree August night. Or searching for a room in vain in Cooperstown during some all accommodation consuming golf tournament and ending up hours later in a fancy high rise hotel in Albany we couldn’t afford. But it was all worth it as the pool was open till 9:00 pm and the kids were just ecstatic.
We didn’t always learn our lesson and didn’t often make reservations, so we were able to get a room in Portsmouth, N.H. late one summer night on the way to Maine only because my wife threatened a nervous breakdown in the lobby when we were told there were no rooms at the inn. We got a room, but when I put the key in the door, the room’s surprised occupant made loud animal noises and shoved it closed in my face. Whoops.
We did the Nashville trips a bunch of times and have a lot of weird memories of making that trek south and then back north. It’s tough living in a bubble, but that’s where we live. The east side of Cleveland is a liberal mecca; a progressive, multicultural urban stronghold that is the place we have lived and loved for more than 45 years. But stepping outside the bubble in Ohio headed south is always a test for bubble inhabitants.
It doesn’t take long outside of Cleveland to get to the miles and miles of rolling hills and flatland that make up rural Ohio. There are times that you have your choice of any number of stock car races and country music on the radio, but not much else. Just south of Columbus, things get really interesting with the religious signage, one massive billboard announcing, “Hell is Real!” This was proven conclusively by the restroom at our next pit stop, which my wife intelligently nixed a personal visit to, rolling her shell-shocked eyes after a quick look-see announcing emphatically, “I’ll wait.”
An experience outside of Mansfield was one that is pretty typical of what you might expect in running your big rig up and down the superhighways of Ohio. Getting into the rural areas had already brought interesting sights and sounds that day. The open pick-up truck with the unbelted “Children of the Corn” passing us at high speed. A slow moving massive unmarked military vehicle carrying a long, wide gargantuan rectangular tented thing, accompanied by a half dozen state troopers in back and then another half dozen in front, lights flashing. Wow, we wondered, what the heck is that? It somehow seemed like it was going to be another one of those trips. Turned out it was.
We stopped to gas up and get MY favorite road trip sustenance: “Bob Evans down on the farm.” Pulling up to the gas station, I warily said to my wife, “Let’s get gas after breakfast.” Maybe a dozen Hells Angels were gassing up and milling about looking rather large and unnecessarily jocular as only Hells Angels can look.
Now I don’t have a real bias as far as the Angels are concerned, even though my college roommate was kicked up a flight of stairs one night at a frat party by the band’s roadie Angels. There was a pretty fun crowd of them that hung out at a bar near where we lived in the early seventies. My wife was on a first name basis with the burly and white bearded chapter president who played Santa Claus for neighborhood kids at Christmas. Nonetheless, if you’re not closely acquainted with a Hells Angel, I’ve learned from some practical experience it’s generally a prudent idea to keep your distance if you don’t have a very good reason to engage one intellectually.
We headed up to Bob Evans, parked the car and settled in for a good, greasy country breakfast. About the time we placed our order, the thunder outside began rumbling as the Harleys started arriving. It looked like we were going to have some company for breakfast, as we had been seated in a pretty much empty section of the restaurant. Only a table of ten ninety-something year old ladies was there and us. The waitresses fussed and scrambled in a tizzy rearranging tables to seat a large, apparently distinguished party of twelve. And I do mean a large party.
We had been waiting a while for our food, when their table had finally been set and in trundled the legion of hulking Angels. These guys are just plain big people, so there is a reverberating pounding the floor takes from their combined bulk and heavy boots. Either unreasonably tall or unreasonably wide or both, they struggled mightily to pack themselves into the insufficient spaces at the tables provided.
These Angels are gloriously and creatively hairy people in the most amazing ways. Covered from head to toe in leather, silver doo dads and denim finery, any bare flesh that peaks out is tattooed in fascinating, colorful body art. An oddly piquant fragrance of eau d’ motor oil, sweaty leather and tobacco was noticeable and seemed entirely appropriate for the scene, given their chosen passion and avocation.
The elderly ladies are intrigued and not intimidated at all. Two stand and go over and marvel at the jacket patches and doo dads and touch them. Yes, touch them. My brain is flashing, “No, no, don’t touch the colors!”
The boys are perfect gentlemen. They engage the ladies in spirited banter about their jackets, tattoos, bikes, even their families. The ninety year olds and the Angels just hit it off. The Angels are up and down, visiting the lady’s table, popping outside for a butt and packing the tiny men’s room as their food starts to come in stages. And let me tell you these are hungry fellows with prodigious appetites.
Mountains of steaming food are brought by a parade of waitresses, and are raucously consumed in good humor. Things usually get quiet when men serious about eating eat. Not now. The decibel level is high as the boys and the girls reveled in their country breakfast and newfound camaraderie.
We quietly eat, pay our bill and carefully depart, blindly finding our way out through a thick haze of cigarette smoke by the front door. Three of the boys are there, laughing it up in an obviously menacing way. We try not to make eye contact. But the tall one with arms like tree trunks steps out to confront me. I visibly wince.
“Drive safe, ya hear?” he growls.
I stammer weakly, “You, too.”
