Road Trip, anyone?

I love 'em. After my family moved up to the Philadelphia area my Father and Brother and I would take a road trip in a Volkswagen Beetle back to Kansas City to see his parents and visit our childhood friends, as well as to give my Mother a much needed break from the overload of Testosterone in the house for the remaining 50 or so weeks of the year.

Those trips were some of the best times of my life for a myriad of reasons. It gave my Brother and I a great opportunity to see a great deal of the country (we didn't always take the same or most direct route from Philly to KC), taught me the value of patience in the face of adversity (dead starter motor on the Beetle in the middle of Ohio on I-70, broken timing belt on a Ford Escort Station Wagon resulting in all eight valves bending beyond use in the middle of Missouri on the same I-70). It also was an open furoum for my Father to extol Brian and I in all kinds of stories and useless (at least we thought so at the time) concerning the history of the origins of many of the American Oil companies, how General motors orchestrated the demise of the Trolley and Horsecar as the main source of transport in urban areas and even small towns.

One of the most memorable trips was one that he and I took in the Fall of 1992 following a miserable failure of an employment attempt here in Houston. He flew down, we rented a car and I drove us back to Philly with all my crap in about two and a half days. his eyesight had gotten so bad that he couldn't drive, so I relied on his conversation to focus on in the wee hours. He told me about his time in the Army in the early fifties and also about the jobs he had at University libraries before he met my Mother. It also stand out because it was the last real quality time I spent with him before he died in a car accident about a month after we got back to Philly.

I've continued the tradition on my own, from using the excuse of having to go back to KC to close out a safe deposit box to travel back to PA from Houston to see family and friends (a redux of the trips with Brian and my Father, just in the opposite direction) to forays into Wet Texas for no other reason than to answer the caall of wanderlust. Watching the miles melt away, chattering on the CB with whoever there is to talk to and stopping wherever and whenever the notion strikes me (something that was not really an option on trips with Dad, who loved to push it and make as much time as possible).

The point of all this reminiscing about road trips is that the increasingly out of reach price of gasoline, which is a direct result of the ill-advised excursion that the Shrub and the Shooter have dragged this country into along with the manipulations of the market by the belmouths of big oil, is putting the opportunity for the average American family to enjoy the ability to embark on trips like this more and more out of reach. Whether they're camping trips, cross country tours of historical sites or state and national parks, or simply trips to see family and/or friends in other cities or the country, they are (or were) an integral part of family recreation and bonding time.

Just one more piece of collateral damage in this self serving and never ending War on Terror(Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL))