Holiday Road
Who doesn’t love National Lampoon’s Vacation with Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall, Eugene Levy, John Candy and Christie Brinkley? That trip took the Griswold family from Chicago to Wallyworld in California in the green Family Truckster that loses parts all along the way. We are in Springfield, Ohio tonight after our first 520 miles from Ithaca today. It was an uneventful day except for our lunch stop at the Shirley Diner in Erie, PA, where they had pictures on the wall of all the famous Shirley’s in our life and times. My personal favorite was Shirley Booth, who played Hazel the maid on TV.
Today’s journey is a bit of a forced march since we have 620 miles to go covering three entire Midwestern states. Once we exit Ohio we will cross Indiana, Illinois and Missouri to land ourselves once again in Prairie Village, Kansas. There we will dine with Kate Fredericks at her home. Kim, Candice and Betty, affectionately known as “the girls”, will stay with Kate, while the boys bed down at the nearby Fontaine Hotel. We will be blowing through St. Louis as we hop across the Ole’ Mississippi, Gateway to the West with its Saarinen Arch that we visited last month on our journey East.
So far we have caravanned with ease, not losing the G&OMobile at any turns in the road and choosing to stop for breaks with high mutuality for stretching and bathroom breaks. Today, G&O will peel themselves off in some medium-sized burg or other to find a local Bank of America to get a certified check cut and sent for some mysterious tax payment that must be handled this week. We seem to be in a transitionary moment in financial history. On the one hand we all write fewer and fewer checks and have more and more micro-finance transactions that debit payments to our credit and debit cards as well as ACH debits direct to our bank accounts. And yet, every once in a while we get dragged back to the anachronistic necessity to get certified or bank check to assure some archaic institution (in this case a U.S. Government agency and/or tax collector) that they can expect payment with certainty rather than have the normal wheels of financial process be relied upon. It’s crazy and I wish such craziness could be eliminated just as Highway tollbooths have been largely eliminated.
As we headed down to NYC a few weeks ago, I realized that I had given up our EZ-Pass when we moved west and changed vehicles. I thought that meant that I would be relegated to the longest toll line at the booth. Instead, I saw that with the complete elimination of tollbooths came a license photographic process that would send me a bill if there was no digital signal to tell the system that I had an account. This strikes me as a very civilized approach that seems to finally begin to catch up with our European counterparts who manage to give you speeding tickets of all sorts via similar monitoring and billing methodology. Maybe I should dislike this impersonal taxation, but today, with G&O needing to peel off from our convoy to go back to Main Street Banking USA, I’m inclined to want more, not less, automation.
This morning I awoke early because we fell asleep early thanks to the long driving day. My Marriott hotel room was comfortable but I found that there were no bath towels for my shower. I felt less like Chevy Chase on the road than Steve Martin in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, when he goes into the motel bathroom after John Candy and has to dry off with a washcloth. There was no automated solution for this failure of hospitality service, but I assure you I will complain and request a discount at the front desk when I leave. I have now done that and gotten $196 taken off my night’s stay (70% of the cost), so I feel vindicated.
As good a start of the day that that provided, what I really enjoyed was an Audible book that came as a recommendation from a professor friend at Cornell. The book is called The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. I had no idea what the book was about but have, over the course of the day, become captivated by it. It is broken into four sections; one on apples, one on tulips, one on marijuana and one on the potato. Each section delves into unique and largely unknown aspects of each plant. Each one had a fascinating history and pathway of development. The apple was all about its dissemination across America as a basis of alcohol (hard cider) and only eventually as a food product. Tulips focused on flowers as things of beauty that devolved into things of financial value to the point of creating a renowned financial bubble. And the history of marijuana, a landmark drug of my generation, delved into the way in which man has used psychotropic substances to achieve altered states. The revelations about the extent and variety of involvement of people of all ages and cultures using plant-based drugs was all news to me. Some books work well as audiobooks and some don’t. This book grabbed me right from the start and now I can’t wait to learn more about the potato, if you can believe that. Without a long drive across some very flat states, I might never have known so much about the botany of desire.
I admire people who can spin interesting stories out of every day things or events. I find interest in the most mundane places. I don’t think in the case of this book that I’m all alone since Michael Pollan’s book has been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. That may be the best accolade available in a greatly changed publishing world. I have three books that I’ve written on very different subjects ranging from business memories to Dead Head drug culture. All are in the queue for publishing one way or another. My goal,is to write as well as Michael Pollan and find ways to tease interesting stories out of every day things.
The drive across Illinois and Missouri was pretty uninteresting except when we skirted St. Louis. We drove straight through and picked up some Wendy’s chili to eat on the road. As we approached Kansas City from the East the skies got ominously dark. When we got into the Missouri side of KC the skies opened up and unleashed a torrent of rain that was as violent as any rain storm I’ve ever seen. We stopped at the hotel to check in and then worked our way through the lush green neighborhoods to Kate’s house.
Chevy Chase drove his truckster across the country ogling Christie Brinkley and keeping his eye on Wallyworld. I’m not sure why my Holiday Road needs esoterica like factoids on Botany to keep me entertained, but it just does. I find myself wondering what stories will come out of tomorrow’s drive across an even flatter state of Kansas as we head towards Denver.