"This must be the turn, H.J....why don't you just stop and ask this man? H.J.?"
Many people -- organized, orderly people -- take vacations in June, when summer's warm kiss is still new and humidity is still a rumor. These are the same folks who plan daily itineraries, comparison shop for sunblock, and highlight driving routes months in advance. Not me. I believe in improvisational getaways, which means I usually take to the open road along with all the other procrastinators during the sweltering heat of July and August.
When you plan too much for a vacation, all the joy of packing up and hitching your wagon to a star is lost. If I wanted to sit around obsessing over details, I would stay home and live my everyday life -- it's cheaper and no bathing suits are involved. A vacation should be filled with new adventures, unknown destinations and impromptu lessons learned along the majestic American highway.
My vacation philosophy is not unprompted; I learned it from my father. Dad was the King of Spontaneous Vacations, but it was from necessity, not design. For decades, my mom and dad owned a business that manufactured burial vaults and septic tanks. People have a tendency to drop dead or lay a lateral line whenever they damn well feel like it, and this fact limited Dad's recreational availability. He was extremely reluctant to go off and leave his shop for even a handful of days.
But occasionally, if he felt absolutely sure that business was at a standstill, he would call Mom up on a Friday afternoon and announce that vacation time had come. We were instructed to have ourselves ready to go when he came home from work, usually around six hours later.
This may seem like complete chaos to the average bystander -- and it was -- but my sisters and I thought it was fun and exciting. My mom, who scrambled together socks, undies and Pepto Bismol for the whole clan at a moment's notice, surely held a different, more colorfully worded opinion.
Other fate-trusting philosophies guided these "hurry up and get there" getaways. For example, Dad didn't believe in reservations of any kind. He would rather cruise around for hours amid glaring neon "no vacancy" signs than call ahead, which meant we usually checked in long after dark. He also refused to ask anyone for directions, and he refused to allow my frustrated mother to ask for help, either.
Spontaneity also applied to mealtimes. Dad refused to stand in line to eat and would rather endlessly drive up and down the restaurant strips, cruising like a giant steel land shark, in search of a sparsely populated eatery. Late hotel check-ins usually meant room service was our last chance at a nighttime meal, and that was the grandest treat of all. Staying up late, scarfing club sandwiches or fried chicken on a "Magic Fingers" bed while watching Johnny Carson seemed the whole purpose of a vacation: wonderful, footloose indulgences we never engaged in at home.
The reward for abiding all this chaos was significant. Because we weren't held to prearranged schedules or check-in times, we had the freedom to stop in at any roadside attraction we liked. We became pros at fruit stands, reptile houses, petting zoos, fireworks outlets and truck stops of all kinds. If we wanted to peruse an alligator wrestling pit along Florida's A1A coastal highway, we did just that. If we wanted to view Walking Tall Sheriff Buford T. Pusser's "death car" in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., we did that, too.
From a real-life replica of the Flintstones' Bedrock City somewhere in Arizona to a John Dillinger mock morgue in Nashville, Ind., we soaked up America's roadside culture by the bucket. We stumbled through historically accurate sheep poo in Williamsburg, Va., carved up a watermelon on the way to Colorado's Pikes Peak, and took Polaroids of each other with Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time" car in Nashville, Tenn. We once had a brush with greatness in Gatlinburg, Tenn., when cigar-chomping star Archie Campbell of TV's "Hee Haw" rear-ended our 1977 Mercury Marquis in Pigeon Forge. We were all so excited, Dad didn't even get mad. Of course, my family was still a little shell-shocked from my earlier fistfight with a spider monkey at a petting zoo. (Hey, he tried to steal my Grand Ole Opry souvenir hat; he had it coming.)
Despite the pandemonium, these ad hoc adventures created years filled with excellent stories we now share together during every family function. Dad passed over 10 years ago, but when we talk about those trips today, it's like he's laughing at the end of Mom's kitchen table once again.
Our family vacations taught us important lessons, aside from the difference between state fair donkeys, jackasses and mules, or how far you can drive a loaded-down sedan on a quarter tank of gas. My sisters and I learned by our parents' example that when on vacation, as in life, our destination is not necessarily the only important element. More often, it's the road that leads us there.
