Goin' Mobile

One of the things my old girl and I like to do is travel.  When retirement was just something way off in the future we had visions of traveling around the world seeing strange and exotic places.  After we retired and ran into reality we scaled back those dreams a bit.  We still get to see strange and exotic places, but they are more like the spur capital of the US rather than the wilds of Kenya.  Well, OK, most of the time it is more like the spur capital of Texas because we usually do day trips, but we have fun anyway. (BTW, in case you're interested, the spur capital of Texas is Gatesville, where lives the Coryell Museum and Historical Center, which houses the Mitchell Collection of antique and offbeat spurs.)

The overwhelming majority of our trips are one-tank day trips.  The main reason is that they are cheap entertainment.  For the cost of a tank of gas and one or two meals of road food we can spend all day doing and seeing the things we enjoy.  Usually we will try to take in a garden or museum and do some shopping. 

If the museum thing seems seems a bit hoity toity, that's just an illusion because I'm not talking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art or anything like that.  We have a pretty eclectic taste in museums.  Some of the museums we have enjoyed visiting include: the aforementioned Coryell Museum and Historical Center, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum  (which, BTW, has nothing at all to do with the baseball team), the Dr. Pepper Museum , the Alamo , Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum in Niagara Falls, and the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia.  Obviously some of these are more than a day trip away from our Texas digs, but they may be only a day or so away from you. 

We take a pretty broad view of what constitutes a museum so we have seen things like ice cream and chocolate factories, gem mines, paleontological digs, Anasazi villages, Revolutionary War forts, Civil War plantations, and houses of historical figures, like the House of Seven Gables in Salem Massachusetts, the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California and Kit Carson's house in Taos, New Mexico.

Gardens are another thing that we like to see on our day trips but, again, we have a liberal definition of gardens.  For us it can be a formal botanical garden like the ones in Fort Worth or San Antonio, more diverse gardens such as Cheekwood in Nashville and Kingwood Center in Mansfield, Ohio or arboretums and nature trails such as the Dawes Arboretum in Newark, Ohio.  Anyplace with a nicely planted area or trails through native trees and plants counts as a garden for us.

My wife's favorite travel activity is shopping.  We tend to spend time in little towns with one-off stores and antique shops, which often seem to be little more than flea markets.  We do a lot more shopping than we do buying because, as my wife has pointed out, if we were to buy many more things we would have to add a room to hold them.  We still like shopping though.  I especially like antique stores because they are sort of like museums.  I am interested in old tools from before the turn of the last century and I can often find them in small town antique stores.  We don't usually spend a lot of money in these places because we just don't buy big ticket items; but on most trips we find some little thing that we can't live without, at least until the next garage sale.

A lot of the time when we go on a day trip we have only a vague idea of where we want to go.  We'll head out to some place that sounds interesting, but if that doesn't pan out, we will just change our plans and go someplace else.  For this reason we have always carried a good map with us as well as a AAA travel book and often one of those books you can pick up at Cracker Barrel that lists what is at each interstate highway on and off ramp.  Of course these days we also carry a GPS.  Either that or a smart phone with a GPS app is pretty much an essential these days.  In fact, if you have a smart phone with a GPS app and Internet access, you probably don't even need a hard copy map or travel books.  We're so used to carrying them, though, that we still make sure we have them with us.

One of the things we have learned about day trips is that, if you think ahead a bit, they can easily turn into overnighters.  So when we leave on a day trip that we think might be far enough afield that we won't feel like driving all the way home at the end of the day, we usually pack a small suitcase with enough clothes and toiletries to get us through a second day.  Something else that is helpful if your trip is suddenly extended overnight is one or more hotel chain customer loyalty cards.  Most chains have them and they have proven useful when we needed to get a room without a reservation and most of the hotels and motels in the area were full.  Motel and hotel clerks will often try extra hard to find you a room if you are a member of the club.

Another thing we did to make it easier to turn a day trip into an overnighter on the spur of the moment is to stop delivery of the newspaper.  We get most of the news we need either from the TV or the Internet and a newspaper lying in the drive all day is a good sign to burglars that no one is home.  So you might think about stopping the paper unless it is delivered to a mailbox or somewhere else that would not allow a thief to see that you're not home.  We also have a monitored burglar alarm which we set most of the time that we are gone for more than a few minutes.  Obviously someone could disable an alarm or do a smash and grab and be off with your prize possessions before the police can respond, but anything you can do to make the neighbors' houses look like easier targets than yours is a good thing.

I'll have some more to say about longer trips in a future post.  Right now I have to post this thing and upload the pictures that we took on our last jaunt.