We Lost Our Compass

We're getting ready to take a Ritz trip, and we're not sure where. It may be one of those existential junkets where we move around as the spirit moves us and the weather seems inviting. When we get our of Florida and head west, it's often flooded around the Mississippi. When we go north the rains or heat waves can be intimidating. When we go to the eastern seaboard we get eaten alive by giant mosquitoes. And we can't go much further south.

My inclination so far is to head for Branson, Missouri. We've never been there, but we've seen some features of it on television and it looked like somewhere we'd enjoy, kind of a laid back country music mecca like Gatlinburg, Tennessee which we like, or Nashville. We saw the Grand Ole Opry there a year ago and loved it. So with an RV and our informal tastes we ought to fit right in at Branson.

One year we headed for the Rockies and got close enough to Denver we could see the mountains, even though we were still in Kansas. Thunderheads rose up over them into a blue sky, and we knew we were in for it. That night it rained so hard, with hail beating down on our poor tent pull camper, that we had to run for our lives into our van to wait it out. It lasted for hours, and we slept in the van. In our haste we didn't have time to slide the beds back in under the roof and they got sopping wet.

The next morning we drove about six miles into Lawrence, Kansas with our clothes, our sleeping bags, our pillows and our foam mattresses all soaked with water even after we wrung them out and tried to mop out the camper. Fortunately, we found an open laundromat and began drying things out.

The operator of the laundromat listened to our tale of woe about the night before, and said he'd never seen so much rain there, nothing but water, water everywhere. It reminded him of his years in the navy, which, he said, was the reason he moved to Lawrence, Kansas. He said he never wanted to be near so much water again, and he had taken a ruler and a US map and calculated that Lawrence was the furthest point in the Continental US from any ocean, so that's where he'd live. Now that's quite a reason to live somewhere, I think--to get as far away from something you hate as possible.

We won't go to Branson for any reason so dramatic, but it seems far enough from South Florida that we'll feel we got away from our routines for a time. We'll see.

And from there we might go on further west up the Missouri valley, or over to Memphis and see Graceland, or up the Mississippi to the Dells, or over to Virginia's Shenandoah, or down to New Orleans, or who knows where. We don't.

In most years we didn't have this freedom. Lots of years we didn't have a special destination in mind, but we knew we'd be going to our hometown of Huntington, Indiana, because that's where the folks were. For the forty-one years of our marriage we might go west, east, north, or south from wherever we were living at the time, but we'd need to catch Huntington either going or coming back. For many years we'd stay at the house, but when dad and mom needed to go into nursing homes, we started staying at a motel. Living and working in Florida, we got to see them only a couple of times a year at most, often only once. We treasured those visits because we feared each time we might not see them again.

So this is really the first summer in forty-one years we're free to go wherever we'd like, because for the first time, sad to say, we have no living parents to visit. Barb's dad, then mom, died within about two months of each other this past fall and winter. We still have other relatives and friends in there, but they're apt to be around for awhile so we don't feel the same pressure to head for Huntington.

Maybe that's why we have no real destination in mind this summer. Mom and Dad in their Huntington nursing homes were like a compass, charting every summer trip for four plus decades. Without that compass, we're kind of lost, I think. We don't know where we ought to try to go.