Road Trip Roads

The great pleasure of a road trip is the road. Especially if it’s a road off the interstates and freeways, a two-lane highway, preferably state or county, a blue highway. That’s where the local stands of produce are, and the roadhouses, and the county parks and lakes, and the few surviving drive-in movie theaters, and the Jehovah Witness Kingdom Halls, and the hay being mown, and the grottoes, and the diners and motor courts, and the cars and pickups for sale, and the museums of bicycles and Spam and barbed wire, and the meat processors, and the Amish horse-driven buggies. The best of these roads wind along streams through narrow dells, around and over wooded hills, along ridges with valleys spread out on either side, snake down and bend through towns of 478 people. There is no hurry on these roads. A tractor hauling hay to a barn backs everyone up to a crawl, but no one cares. There should be nowhere to be at any particular time on these roads. The cows lift their heads for a moment as the procession slowly passes.