Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

      This will be the final installment of  my documentary, Peeing Across America. No doubt volumes could be written about our time on the road, and the many stops we made along the way to empty our full bladders, but I don't want to bore the reading audience, so it's best to shake it off, wipe it out and move on. After watching the sun set on the Grand Canyon, we made our way to the Red Feather Lodge where we spent the night. It was kind of a two part lodging facility, something I've never seen before. They had a regular hotel, and a smaller, less fancy, but still fairly expensive motel on the property. Since we were only spending one night and didn't want to finance the next property they wanted to build, we opted for the motel. It was OK. Not great, but it runs in my mind that the shower was good and it did have air conditioning, which frankly was pretty noisy, but I didn't complain. The occupant in the bed next to me was snoring pretty soundly, and when the air...

  I recently read a book by a first time author, Richard Ratay. It's titled,  Don't Make Me Pull Over!   Talk about an eye-catching title. I knew I had to read it, and I wasn't disappointed. The subtitle is,  An Informal History of the Family Road Trip. He starts off with a memory of being seven years old in 1976. He has a blurry recollection of being hauled out of bed in the middle of the night by his father, and being tossed across the laps of his two older brothers in the back seat of the family station wagon. The next thing he knows, he's rudely awakened by landing with a thud on the floor with a rug burn on his cheek from the carpet, and the hump from the transmission in the middle pressing on his stomach. He's surrounded by empty Styrofoam cups, eight track tapes and stuffed animals. He discovers that the cause of the discomfort is that the car has slid on an icy highway in the middle of Nowhere, Indiana and has come to an abrupt stop in a snow bank. As he des...