Excursion 12, Part 3 (All Roads Lead to Coshocton)

In which our intrepid hero discovers a lonely house on a hill…

Having always basically been a city boy, some aspects of living in the country seem very different to me, including basic issues of convenience.  For example, for many years I lived in a townhouse apartment in Grandview, a Columbus neighborhood/incorporated town.  My apartment was not just in walking distance but within ridiculously easy walking distance of a grocery store, a pharmacy, several ATMs, a gas station, a number of restaurants from fast food to fancy, two bookstores, a couple of coffee places, two bakeries, a post office, a produce store, and much more.  I live in a more typical suburb now, which means that only a few things are that close, but essentially everything is just a short car ride away.  But if you live in the countryside, nothing is going to be close, and your options will be fewer.  There are many places in Ohio so far away from a gas station that unless you maintain a gas tank on your property you essentially have to plan when you are going to get gas.  Do you have a late night craving?  Better hope you took that into account when you bought groceries two weeks ago, because no store within many miles will be open.

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Excursion 12, Part 2 (From Farm to Forest)

In which our intrepid hero  visits one of his frequent crossroads…

I have a long history with the television show “I Love Lucy.”  In fact, when I was three or four years old, “I Love Lucy” taught me a valuable lesson.  Sometime in 1969 or 1970 I was watching an episode of “I Love Lucy” and my mother walked into the room and announced that the family was going somewhere.  She turned off the television and we got into the car and left (I have no idea what the destination was).  When we returned, some time later, I turned the television on so that I could finish watching “I Love Lucy.”  But it wasn’t on!  That was when I discovered that when you turned the television off, the shows on TV did not stop playing but continued while you were not around!

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Excursion 12, Part 1 (A Man of No People)

In which our intrepid hero explains his hermit ways…

One reaction that I’ve had to the photographs posted in these blog entries has been to wonder why my photos rarely ever contain people in them.  One person who viewed some of the photos in the blog wondered jokingly if they were images taken after the Zombie Apocalypse.  It’s true that human beings are far and few between in my photos.  One reason is that my photos are all developed using Soylent Green software.  But there are other reasons, too.

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Excursion 11, Part 3 (Motor Castles for Motor Carriages)

In which our intrepid hero encounters much roadside lodging of a bygone era…

Every frequent traveler has their hotel stories to tell.  One little one of mine comes from a trip to Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1990s.  I walked into my hotel room to discover that there was an agitated bee in the hotel room.  That was a little disconcerting.  I am not afraid of bees but I respect them and being in the same hotel room as one struck me as being a mite too close for comfort.  So I called down to the front desk and told them to send someone up with some bugspray.  Eventually a hotel staff member arrived but he didn’t have any bugspray.  How the hotel expected him to kill the bee was beyond me.  What he did have was bug-eyes and I soon discovered the reason that he was so fearful was because he was, allegedly, allergic to bee stings.  “So the hotel sent the one guy allergic to bee stings to come kill my bee?” I asked.  “And didn’t give him anything to kill it with?”   We saw, eventually, that more than anything the bee just wanted out of there—he kept trying to get out through the window (which did not open).  So finally we decided to team up—one of us trapped the bee in some of the window curtains while the other thwacked him with a book (probably the hotel room bible).  Final score:  Bee 0, Two Idiots 1.

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Excursion 11, Part 2 (There and Back Again)

In which our intrepid hero reaches his destination and begins his return to the Shire…

One consequence of growing up in the desert is that I came to enjoy rainy days, rare as they are there.  This, I discovered, was an attitude quite foreign to people living in the Midwest, where I have lived for the past quarter-century.  Yet even so many years later, cloudy days do not depress me as they do so many others and I get a thrill every time a thunderstorm occurs.  Ohio gets its fair share of thunder and lightning, but the most impressive lightning show I ever saw occurred in El Paso one summer night in the mid-1980s.  I left the house that evening on some minor errand, driving on a wide-open street with an expansive view.  The storm had already begun and lightning lit up the entire sky.  Indeed, so many simultaneous lightning strikes were occurring each second that it was almost like an eerie artificial daylight.  I was virtually the only person on the road, so the whole display seemed as if it were some sort of special show just for me.  I have never forgotten that moment.

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Excursion 11, Part 1 (Those Little Town Blues)

In which our intrepid hero rejects Cary Grant and goes south by southwest…

For the past 18 years I have had to travel quite a bit for work, typically training law enforcement officers, prosecutors or judges in some part of the country (or, rarely, abroad).  These travels have taken me to 46 of the 50 states and, were it not for incidents such as breaking an ankle, I would have visited 49 of the 50 states by now.  Because of those facts, many people think that I get to see far more than I get to see.  “Wow,” is a typical comment, “You’ve really seen every corner of the country.”  But this is work travel, not vacation travel.  It turns out that the Jackson, Mississippi, airport looks a lot like many other airports and the Hilton hotel conference center in Yellow Snow, North Dakota, is amazingly similar to the Marriott hotel conference center in Asscrack, Alabama.  I’ve been to Arizona many times, for example.  Have I ever seen the Grand Canyon?  Not on your life.  Moreover, when I travel for work I am not even of the mindset that wants to go do a touristy thing.  My overwhelming desire is to get in, do what I need to do, and get back home.

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Excursion 10, Part 2 (The Bottomless Barn)

In which our intrepid hero learns that there is at least one way to skin a barn…

When I was a kid, there was a popular t-shirt that depicted a mouse in the grasp of an eagle’s talon.   Even as the eagle was lifting him off the ground to be lunch, the mouse gave the eagle the finger.  I tried to find such a shirt on the web, or the original artwork, but failed.  However, you can find a cruder, less dynamic version if you do a Google image search on “the last great act of defiance.”  Why do I mention this 1970s t-shirt?

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Excursion 10, Part 1 (My Baby Thinks Three’s A Train)

In which our intrepid hero discovers a three-tiered transport…

One of the fringe benefits of a hobby like this is that it adds an extra flair to many mundane activities.  For example, a friend of mine who lives in Troy, Ohio, invited me over on June 8 to play a strategy game.  Troy is a town north of Dayton that is perhaps 75 minutes away from Columbus via the Interstate.  But if I left several hours early, I could use back roads to get some picture taking before I got there, which is what I did.  Now I wasn’t simply trying to get from Point A to Point B, I was also having an experience.

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Excursion 9, Part 4 (The Safe House)

In which our intrepid hero discovers the safe that could not save itself…

For the past 18 years, I have had to travel a lot for work.  That means a lot of stays in hotels.  After all these years, I know exactly what I want and don’t want from hotels (don’t worry, I won’t list them).  Hotels rarely surprise me, although sometimes they definitely still do.  Things were a lot different when I was a kid, though.  Hotels—or, more typically, motels—were rare and strange creatures.  We could rarely afford to travel much, so the few vacations I went on as a kid are pretty much engrained on my mind.  They weren’t really very far—places you could get to by car—and were all in the Southwest:  Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, etc.  As a kid, I found motels both exciting and a drag.  They were a drag, because we’d typically get a room with two double beds and my sister and I would have to share a bed and we got little sleep (plus, my parents snored).  But on the other hand, they were unbelievably cool.  Even things like ice machines seemed strange and exotic.   There was stationery in every room!  More than once, we had those “Magic Fingers” beds you could pay a quarter to have vibrate.  We couldn’t get enough of that.

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Excursion 9, Part 3 (Shack Attack)

In which our intrepid hero experiences the concord of (New) Lexington…

In America, there is a great gulf between rich and poor.  Even greater than the gulf in income, I think, is the gulf in empathy and understanding.  Most middle class and an even greater number of wealthy people have no personal experience in what it is like to experience poverty—statistics clearly show that social mobility in the United States is not very high (in fact, among developed countries, the U.S. has one of the lowest rates of social mobility).  I myself am in a somewhat unusual position.  Twice in my life I have experienced extended periods of poverty, while currently I have a comfortable middle class income.  Moreover, because of the university I did my undergraduate work at and because of the job I currently hold, I have met or been friends with many people far wealthier than me, including a couple of billionaires.

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