Lessons learned on a Road Trip...

Recently I took a road trip to Dallas, Texas for a job interview.  It was an amazing trip, sort of one of my hikes on the trails around here, but on a bigger scale.  Now, granted, I would much rather see the scenery of this great land by foot, but since I haven't won the lottery yet (and won't, since I don't play), I saw the short, quick version.  Absolutely magnificent, and the lessons I learned while doing it are well worth mentioning.

Never take "Not Exactly."



And that's not just on Rental Cars.  The only thing that non-brand names are better and more
satisfying are the store brand jars of jelly.  And mayonnaise.  But not rental cars.  I understand that there's not an option sometimes, and cheaper is the only way to go.  Turns out, this time, it was definitely not cheaper.  I chose SixT Auto Rental (it's a European thing) because the online quotes were much cheaper than the more recognizable brands.  Turns out... that's because the other costs weren't even on the website... they added them later...

The additional fees made the rental the same price as those of the other national rentals, whose prices were clearly stated on their websites.  Also, the additional $250 deposit was not stated at all at the website.  Finally, the employees at the return/pick up lot were friendly, but not particularly professional, with one of the workers saying that the car they had picked out for me was one that she was going to use later.  The driver that brought the cleaned car to me stepped out of the vehicle eating a bag of cheetos, with all that orange dust on his hands.  Not at all what a customer wants to see.  The car was fine, as was the return process itself afterwards.  I still don't know how the deposit situation shook out, as the invoice said nothing about it, and the additional $100 I had to pay will have to come out of that, since the credit card I used only had what I thought I was actually paying on it.  Next time, I will not go with "Not Exactly."

Then, when I got to the motel (I used Super 8), the very kind front desk person informed me that the credit card I used wouldn't work.  So I pulled out my debit card.... it wouldn't work either :O (that's me making the big Macaulay Culkin shocked face!) Out of money in a big city 1000 miles away, and at Midnight.  So I call my brother (1:00 AM Eastern) and woke him up and explained the problem.  Fortunately, he was able to re-reserve the room and I walked into a musty, smoke-filled (it was not supposed to be smoked in) room which I cleared out by turning the AC on.  Unfortunately, the AC went into the curtain which blew out when I turned the air on.  And there was no way of keeping the curtain from doing that.  So I used, for once in my life, the Gideon's Bible to trap the curtain against the window (I'm going to Hell, I know). I went to sleep using my internal alarm clock (which always works) knowing that I'd probably have danishes and maybe even eggs in the breakfast room that was right next door to my room.  Next morning, I find cold cereal, pancake batter, and packaged cinnamon rolls.  I just took a pastry and went back to my room.

AudioBooks Rock!!!

By the time I reached Birmingham (after a wonderful breakfast buffet at the Shoney's in Anniston (everyone stop there on the way out on 20, keep the place in business!), my music had failed me, and I was feeling my eyes unfocus and me getting droopy.  So, I decided, that wasn't going to work, and I popped in the 1st CD of David Weber's Off Armageddon Reef I stayed awake throughout the rest of my trip, all the rest of the 1,721 miles.  I never thought that Audiobooks would keep me awake more than singing at the top of my lungs to my favorite songs, but it absolutely delivers.  It's a completely different part of the brain, and I could easily "read" while driving, keeping alert and focusing on the road while my inner "eye" focused on the images being formed in my head.  It kept the people chained to the cave wall busy while the real person traveled topside (Plato).

Book Review: Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber

The book itself is the start of a series that takes place on a island-covered world, post human destruction by a formidable, but slow, alien race.  David Weber constructs an entire sociological structure, religion, economy, everything, and while some people probably are going to criticize Weber for page after page of describing the tenets of The Church of God Awaiting, I found it fascinating. Pausing the plot to build a world makes the best books, in my mind.  Some of the books I've loved, I'd rather get rid of the plot entirely. See Neal Stephenson's Ananthem where the plot basically gets in the way of amazing philosophical dialogue. When I travel back to Dallas to begin my new job, I will put the sequel into my mp3 player and will stay awake the whole time.

Everyone! Go to Braums!

It has the best everything... fries, burgers, ice cream... because it's all fresh.  They only exist within a 300 mile radius of Tuttle, Oklahoma.  I won't deny that being in the "Braums Zone" had some influence on taking the job in Dallas.  And the food was as superb as I remember.  My friend C., whose house got flattened in the Moore tornado, is the head of Public Relations for Braums, which makes me insanely jealous, and is so ironic since her main love is training and running marathons across the country.  The nearest one is about 5 minutes from Brookhaven College, which is where I'll be working as the Assistant Manager of the Bookstore.

Dallas has it together!

The transportation system in Dallas is complex, and while things are constantly under construction, they have a plan to better the transportation around the city. The HOV lanes are actually on bridges above the interstates, and they have their own exits and such.  The buses run everywhere throughout the city, and passes are affordable (especially if you take into account gas prices nowadays).  With my apartment being next to various stores, I won't have to drive much of anywhere except 5 minutes to work, so it will save on gas, and if I want to go someplace, I can hop on the bus system and travel anywhere.  Or drive out to the lakes, the parks, or to any number of places in Texas and Oklahoma where my friends and family are living.  The Lakehouse my grandmother used to own is only 1.5 hours north, on the Lake of the Arbuckles.

Vicksburg, MS over the Mississippi River.

I'm so excited to be taking this new path in my life.  Everybody wish me luck, and I'll blog again on from the Lone Star State.  Farewell Georgia (which isn't true, it's only a 12 hour drive), and Hello Texas!!

Getting Lost

Every ten years or so, my family scrounged up the resources, traveled the short distance to Tattersalls Books next to the Bruno's store in Conyers and bought the latest edition of the Atlanta Metro Map book. About $100, 300 pages of maps, roads twisting from page to page, zip codes, rivers, the imagination running wild as to what was actually on those streets. What landmarks made the road builders make Atlanta's streets as they did, curved and hilly, with no seeming reason as to their existence? And we could travel down the myriad of Flat Shoals Roads or Peachtrees until we no longer knew where we were, or mistaken Ronald Reagan Blvd. for Ronald Reagan Parkway (which I have done) and wound up at a dead end late at night, with only the lights of the billboards to show us home. That's why the Map book was so necessary. It was our guide, our lifejacket in the middle of paths that went absolutely everywhere. But, of course, this was before the days of readily available internet connections, before Technopoly took over even these corners of our lives.

Last week I went with the Friends of the Nancy Guinn Library (Conyers, Georgia) to the FOGL conference in Cumming. It was my first trip in a car with a GPS system. It also strengthened my resolve never to purchase one of those for my car. It infuriated me, the logical ability it had to get the van (and it's driver) from one place to another. Because I, for one, want to get lost.

When I was little, I would be in the car with my mother, and we'd be going to the store, or to some doctor appointment. I'd look out and see roads going parallel, across, and away from me. I saw the houses, the businesses, all foreign to me, new, unexplored. "Mom, where do those roads go?" I asked, constantly. Take SW 15th street, for instance, away from our neighborhood, it became a dirt road and went into a forest next to a creek. And while my parents told me it didn't go over the river, it never kept me from dreaming exactly where it went. I don't think I ever went down the road myself, and maybe that's for the best. The unknown is so much more Romantic than what is traveled.

Detmer Highway, Yukon Territory, Canada

But there is nothing that is unknown now, not with the Internet within easy reach of our fingers at every moment. Google Maps has taken satellite images of almost every corner of our globe. I've talked about walking down a highway in the Yukon Territory in Canada, with the mountains in the foreground and the grass ranging forever to my side. I've traveled the streets of London, wondering who lived in those houses, what their lives were like. And so there's still the sense of the unknown, even when sitting at the repository of everything known. The GPS system, however, totally removes all Romantic notions of traveling down strange roads. Your path becomes a straight line, purple, with a British accented guy informing you of the way, as if God was speaking directly to you. There is no other path but Garmin, or Tom Tom. There is no getting in the car and cruising down the interstate, with the feeling of never wanting to get off of it, of traveling forever into the distance, to the ends of the Earth. Now it is point A to point B, and then, "You've Arrived!" What a feeling, to worship a piece of technology because we've gotten to our destination without using our brains. Perhaps that's what people want to do now, in all aspects of life. And now, I want to digress.

 ***

Technology has substituted for us every simple thing we do in life, except breathing, I guess. Need to balance your checkbook or make change at the cash register? Why, we have calculators and tills that do that. It's no longer necessary to do any menial task like addition and subtraction, especially not in our heads. I remember going to a Virginia McDonald's near the Virginia state line some years ago. They had just installed monitors at the check out lines, and so the workers there had gotten into the habit of not remembering anything about our orders. So it was look at the monitor, get one sandwich, look at the monitor, get the fries, look at the monitor, get the drink. Each order took 10 minutes at least. They let technology take over for their memories. And this happens all the time. The number of people who can repeat their cell phone number, or ones for their churches or businesses, are dwindling, because they easily have them stored on their cell phones. There is no longer a need to remember phone numbers. And it's not just actual electronic devices. We have devices to take care of any thing that might be the least bit taxing. I once saw, while cleaning my mom's office, a letter folder. That's right, a machine that folds a piece of paper exactly into thirds. And then there's the shirt folder (now, honestly, I can't fold shirts to save my life, so I don't try.). There's an electronic pepper shaker, so that we don't have to actually grind and shake the pepper ourselves.

 It's not just the idea that we are getting lazy, which we are, but that we are substituting technology, even in the simplest form, to do every task that we have done in the past. And for what cost? How much resources does it take to create these things? What plastic, what oil? I'm not environmental by any means, but we have been used to purchasing any device that might make our lives easier, and sacrificing those materials to do it. How long will those things sit in our landfills when, inevitably, we throw them away for something better? Why bother typing a text when we can speak into our phones and keep from typing all together. Soon the art of typing a letter will go the way of handwriting. It will become useless. The main purpose of all this? Capitalism. Producing things that cost money in order to feed our need to save time, money, labor, all the things we usually wind up wasting anyway because of these objects. Debating whether this is a good thing or not, Capitalism, I mean, is a whole other blog.  But again, I digress...
***

Back to getting lost.  I never take the same way home that I took going wherever it is that I am going.  Which makes coming home so much more fun.  My mom and I often go to Southern Gospel concerts here in the Atlanta area.  And it often is that leaving the church or the Gwinnett Arena, the roads we came in on are blocked off.  We have to make a right instead of a left.  If I had a GPS system, it would automatically adjust and take me on a path straight home.  But what most people should know is that, if you look at Atlanta like a spoked wheel, it is impossible to remain totally lost for long.  You're bound to run into an Interstate or GA 400 or something, so driving home becomes an adventure.  Turn the car in the direction of the spokes, and go.  We were at a singing in Gainesville, and, heading west, we drove over Lake Lanier, over a beautiful blue steel bridge, and drove through little towns and hole in the wall restaurants, and we hit 400 and came south.  I wasn't lost.  I was just not in a hurry to get home.  When my family went to New Orleans to see Oklahoma lose to LSU in the Sugar Bowl several years ago, going home I went the wrong way and we ended up crossing Lake Pontchartrain, on a bridge that took you away from land, so far out that you could see nothing but the lake.  It was also a bridge that was destroyed a few years later by Hurricane Katrina.  Getting lost allowed us to see the beauty of nature, the exaltation of mankind's creations, the harmony of both God and Man intertwined in this great country.  So maybe getting from point A to point B isn't enough.  Maybe hearing "You've arrived at your destination," is the worst part of the trip.  As a busting-minded animated girl once said, "The Joy is in the Journey." There is so much to see between the cradle to the grave.  Let's not take the shortest route. 

Butterfly in the Sky...

A friend of mine posed a question the other day on Facebook, and it was an interesting one, so I thought I'd answer it.

"If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?" A simple question, really, but what made it fascinating were the answers that she got. Italy. Ireland. Greece. European countries mainly. The underlying question that I heard was "Why would you want to go there?" What makes people want abandoned ruins and lavish castles? What makes them yearn for lavish countrysides, or the beauty of fellow people on European beaches? Why look for greener grass?

I certainly understand the seduction of travel. There have been times, when, traveling at 70mph on the interstate through Conyers that I just wanted to keep going, to travel to someplace else, wherever, and enjoy my life of freedom. But, as Shawn Mullins sang, "Freedom's just a metaphor / You got no place to go." Freedom, the ability to run away from the life we have, has a strong pull. It's running away from reality, escaping from this place to another. I have known people to do it. A good percentage of the people that have worked at Borders with me have quit suddenly and moved to California, or Colorado, or Texas. Someplace far away from Georgia. Whether they found what they were looking for, I'm not sure. I hope they did. But I've had other friends that, just to get away, moved to Canada. One found happiness, marriage. The other, misery, loneliness. She moved back later and was a shadow of herself. And of course, it is certainly possible to escape from reality by taking drugs, alcohol...etc... but since I'm not talking about that necessarily, I won't. I do want to mention that reading can push that need to get away even more. There are scenes in Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts that describe the shores of the Greek Isles. Idyllic, almost paradise, and those scenes really make you want to visit there. I'll return to travel and reading in a minute.

So let's say you have the money to go to Europe and travel around Italy. Now, don't misunderstand me, I'd love to go and do just that, but let's think for a moment about why someone would want to go to Europe in the first place. Everyone talks about the Historical landmarks...the castles, the churches, the paintings and masterpieces of geniuses that lived hundreds of years ago. The achievements of mankind are definitely a worthy subject for study. I doubt one could stand in front of Michelangelo's David and not feel a sense of awe that a human being could have conceived such a piece of art. Similarly, you couldn't stand in front of St. Peter's cathedral in Rome, with the outstretched arms folding outward, embracing you, and not see the magnificence of what we can build when we try. We should see this in our own country, our own city, our neighborhoods. Because the difference is merely one of conception and usage. Could we not stand in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, and, seeing the mathematical formulas that stand the structure erect, marvel in the masterpiece that men had constructed, right here in America? Or the skyscrapers in New York City, or Chicago, or Atlanta, raised to the sky in some high praise for what we have done with the iron, the steel, the rock of this nation? It is what holds us up, holds us together. (you will excuse me if I've taken a page from Rand...it makes me feel good, right in a way.) So when you go to Europe and stand before the Colosseum, or you wander about the Parthenon, realize the rocks that were carved into these shapes are not what is awe inspiring, but the people who built them are. I think if I were to go to the Old World, what would be truly wonderful to see would be the Aqueducts in Spain, still carrying water from the mountains to the villages, after all these years. Or maybe the sections of the Via Appia that still cover the streets of Italian villages, that are still used today like cobblestone streets.

If I were to travel anywhere in the world, I would go first to the Peruvian Andes, and see the marvels of Macchu Picchu, of the roads and bridges that still stand, and of the ancestors that still use those bridges. What power the Incas must have had, to construct the buildings of that city, with such angles of perfection and consistency. Only the pyramids of Egypt would compare in architectural wonder. But as I said before, it's not really the buildings I would want to see, but the people and the culture of the society that made them. So actually, it would not be just a place I would travel, but a time.

I wouldn't want just to see the Parthenon, covered as it is now with iron bars and archeologists who are trying to keep it erect. And aside them, the markets and the souvenir shops that sell postcards and t-shirts, that keep the 21st century very much in the forefront of the mind. I would rather walk amongst the people of ancient Greece, the philosophers sitting amongst the trees arguing of human principles, the politicians being just that, the worshipers of Zeus and Athena, the common people, the slaves, the difference of it all. The only thing that would nag at me would be that they never found the wheel to be of any use. Why build tools of convenience when slaves did all the work? It is the one thing that kept Greece and Rome from becoming truly great and progressing as far as they could have. Ah, to see them going about their daily lives, to see human society as something completely different from the world today. That would be incredible.

And the same would go with other cultures. The Incas, the Mayas, the Aztec. To watch the Mayan astronomers calculate the Sun and stars for centuries ahead of them, with complete accuracy, at the observatory at Chitzen Iza, or at Palenque. To witness the barbaric sacrifice of human victims to the Aztec gods upon the temples towering into the sky, not so much for the Gods, but in reality, to show the power of the Aztec Empire to the neighboring tribes. These are things I would see, not just the ruins of Teotihuacan and Tikal.

The power of human life is not just in the incredible or the violent. I would want to see people living in their day to day lives. I have always wanted to return to the days of the 1920's, prior to the mechanical devices that we have today, and see how people in America lived. What would Milledgeville have looked like, or Shady Dale, or Conyers for that matter? What swimming holes would be filled with children swimming instead of the absorbed in the electronic whirrs of the Xbox 360 or Wiis? The rocking chairs would be filled outside of porches, the sky would be pitch black dark after sunset, and the stars would shine and glimmer through the treetops. Yes, life was hard, and people died of common diseases and so forth... but there must be happiness that they found in doing things that we have lost today, because getting to Level 17 is more important than climbing a tree.
Let's face it, reality is not like that. We have no technology to let us go back in time, nor to we all have the money to go flying of to lands foreign and romantic. While this sounds like a big cliche, we do have books that we can read. Out of the minds of authors come lands and societies real and imaginary. I could just as well find a copy of Plato's Republic and sit in with the Greek philosophers, or pick up a copy of Gary Jennings' novel Aztec and relive the days prior to the arrival of Cortez. The worlds of mankind are neatly compiled into words, and then transformed into reality in our minds.

A perfect example, coming from the current news, is the story of the 13 year old Dutch girl that tried to sail around the world alone. You can find her story on Yahoo easily enough. She was retained by Dutch authorities and is now in State Care, so vehemently against the trip is the government, for some reason. But there's no need to do that right now, as there have been people before her that have succeeded. Take Robin Lee Graham, who wrote the book Dove about his adventures around the world. The experiences that he had on Pacific islands, the paradises he found, the extreme loneliness on the boat alone for weeks on end, it is all magnificently written for anyone to read.

And when the current rules of society are too much for us to bear, we can simply read about worlds that are in another reality. Take Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of a Distant Earth, a set of stories that take place on a colony planet in the far reaches of space, where people have been sent to start the human race afresh, with the entire knowledge of mankind, but without the religious or societal prejudices that have set this world in the direction it has gone. The makers of the spaceship loaded the libraries of the Earth, but omitted anything with references to God or to the horrors of man. Tough choices, but the result was a colony that was much different from Earth. It was a pleasure to read, a a book of Tabula rasa, where people could find their own moral standards and live life according to them.

Or take Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, which is the most liveable world in Fantasy Literature. Amazing scenery, and you are surrounded by dragons constantly, ones with abilities that we could only dream of here. I'd give anything to live in Benden Weyr, or at the Harper's school next to Fort Hold.

So to answer the question of where I would like to go, I would say, "Wherever the pages in my books will take me." And if, by some chance, I get to actually visit those worlds, then they shall be but echoes, dreams, of what resides in my head.