At about this time of year in the area of Eastern Kentucky in which I live, I see or hear people I know who are extremely excited because they are going on vacation to some spot they have been going for the last many years. Generally, these people have never been on a real vacation to any other spot in the country. Once in a while they say they "went somewhere else and I didn't like it" or "I went somewhere else and I had to drive all the way to get there" or "I went somewhere else and it was too expensive". For me, the only one of those statements that has any validity whatever is "...it was too expensive". But there are dozens of great spots to take a vacation within a reasonable distance at a reasonable price near just about anywhere anybody in America lives. I love to see places I've never seen, meet people I've never met, do things I've never done, and have new experiences of almost any kind. Why does anybody want to go to the very same place for a "vacation" year after year, frequently staying in the same hotel or bed and breakfast, eating meals in the same restaurants which are often other locations of the same chains they eat in at home, and often seeing the same attractions year after year?
In the area in which I live, there are about a half dozen locations I see people visiting year after year and most of them are not places I would ever want to visit twice. Those areas include Gatlinburg, TN; Virginia Beach, VA; Myrtle Beach, NC; and Cherokee, NC. These people come back saying how much fun they had going to Dollywood or swimming at the beach where they have been on numerous occasions. I do not understand that kind of thinking. Yes, I have been to Dollywood, Gatlinburg, Cherokee, and Virginia Beach, most of them one time each. I have been to one of two of them twice. But I have also been in thirty-one of the 50 US states and can't wait to get to the other 19. I have been from New York state to Arizona, from South Florida to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to Nogales, Mexico, and I loved nearly every minute of all those trips. I despise going to some place I've seen a dozen times before, staying the same, now deteriorating hotel, eating in the same restaurants, and often seeing the same dull people who are stranded in the same low paying jobs. I even see a lot of these people I am referring to who could easily afford to take a vacation anywhere they wanted to.
For me, the ultimate vacation is to get in a good vehicle with my wife, and point it in a direction toward some destination I have never been. We do usually book a place to stay every night along the route because my wife has been in a wheelchair for over 20 years and has trouble sleeping in ordinary hotel beds. But we also often schedule little of what we are going to do on these vacations and let the route dictate what happens. Twice on our way to visit her family in Wisconsin we have taken spontaneous, totally unplanned trips which turned out to be two of the best trips we were ever on. Once we suddenly decided to go visit the University of Wisconsin-Platteville where she went to college which is in the northwest corner of Wisconsin. Her family have always lived about an hour north of Milwaukee in the southeast portion of the state. We hung a left in southern Indiana and crossed into Iowa at Clinton, Iowa, and then hung a right and drove up the old US highway along the Mississippi River to Dubuque, Iowa, and into southwest Wisconsin to Platteville. It was a great trip up the Big Muddy. We stayed in a little motel in Clinton, Iowa, and had a great pizza for supper from a little pizzeria in that town where, most likely, many of the locals eat every day. On the other trip to visit her father, after her mother had died, she suddenly said, somewhere in Indiana, "I've never been in Michigan. Let's go up through Michigan, across the Upper Peninsula and south his house." That's exactly what we did. We drove up the western edge of Wisconsin, stopped in Grand Rapids, spent a night in Saint Ignace, Michigan, spent half a day on Mackinac Island, drove across the Upper Peninsula, bought dried fish in a little store with antique coolers just like the ones in my parents' store when I was a boy, and drove down the eastern edge of Wisconsin to her father's house. We ate fresh cherries from a roadside stand, saw the National Park on Mackinac Island, shot some photos of some Lake Michigan lighthouses, and had a ball.
Once in South Louisiana, when we were staying in an AirBNB in Jeffersonville, LA, we took a day and drove down an old two lane highway to the Gulf of Mexico stopping at a few little restaurants which caught our eyes along the way. We got the best pork roast I ever ate in a little restaurant stuck between a bayou and the highway, and some of the best fried shrimp and crawfish etouffee I have ever had in another little place with gingham curtains sitting beside the highway in a little town most people never go to if they visit New Orleans or Baton Rouge. On that same trip, we also toured the LA state capitol, saw the spot where Senator Huey Long was assassinated, and had a fine experience with the security people at the capitol which you could have only had in a southern state before gun violence and bun related domestic terrorism became rampant in America. We had parked in a free lot on the banks of the Mississippi and walked to the capitol a block away. I never thought a thing about having my pocket knife in my pocket and when I got to the metal detector I remembered the knife, showed it to the security people, and asked "don't you just put things like this in a box or envelope and hold them till people leave" to which they said "no, we can't do that. But do you see those bushes at the bottom of the steps. Just take it out there, pick out a bush, and hide it under the bush till you get done" which is what I did. You can't have that kind of experience in Gatlinburg or Myrtle Beach.
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And the beautiful sign below was on a carpet store marquee sign in El Paso, Texas, in October 2017. I went inside to meet the owner and thank him for speaking out and defending America.
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