A Sunday Drive

08 Monday May 2017

Tags

Bryan, countryside, France, Houston, politics, reflecting, road trip, rural, Sunday drive, Texas, Weekly Photo Challenge, Williams Jennings Bryan

It’s a summer weekend several decades ago, and my dad is seeking company for his customary Sunday activity: a drive in the country. As usual, I am the only taker. Sometimes we look at houses, occasionally we explore new areas, but most of the time we just drive out into the country and admire the rustic fences, the barns, the crops, and above it all, the sweeping sky. We chat or we don’t, and we inevitably end up at a Dairy Queen for a twist cone at the end of the day. These yawning days are among my favorite childhood memories.

***

Flash forward, and there is still something about an unscheduled Sunday that cries out for a jaunt in the car. Yesterday I answered the call, and we loaded the vehicle with the dog, some water, and a few snacks, and headed northwest from Houston to enjoy a spectacular spring day on the road.

Our destination is the perfect distance away (less than two hours) and has an additional attraction; a town called Bryan, Texas, named after my distant relative, William Jennings Bryan. Three-time presidential candidate (and perpetual loser), secretary of state, famed orator, and attorney both admired and ridiculed, Bryan is a direct ancestor on my father’s side of the family. Hailing from Illinois originally, but a long-time resident of Nebraska (where my grandfather was born), Bryan somehow left his mark quite deeply in Texas, where he owned a winter home and farm.

The journey itself ends up being the enchantment. The sky is a blue bed of white puffballs, and the early crops are a cheerful lemon-green. Rural fences always rope me in, and today is no exception. We see white pickets, split rails, and dark wood dividers on both sides of the road. We get off the main highway as often as possible and keep swerving off onto the berm to photograph the ranch gates, both simple and elaborate, along the way. We follow the web of farm-to-market (FM) routes, observing the network of roads that physically connect rural America to our large cities.

My husband eats a Texas-sized beef brisket sandwich at a popular BBQ joint at 11 am, halfway through the drive out, and is still sated when we arrive home in the late afternoon. We stop at a famous rest stop/gas station to fuel up at bargain prices and peruse the outlandish array of paraphernalia available there, from fresh fudge to hot dogs, homemade kolaches to every bag snack you’ve ever heard of, stuffed animals to camouflage gear, and the “cleanest restrooms in America.”

The historic town of Bryan is closed down on this Sunday afternoon, which is fitting given William Jennings’ religious bent later in life. We wander through the downtown streets for a few blocks anyway and then load the old pooch back in the car and retrace our route back to the big city.

We’ve accomplished little, but we’ve temporarily cleared our heads in all that fresh air and sprawling land. Unfortunately, mine is now spinning with thoughts, reflecting on presidents and populations, of byways and barriers. This is what most of America looks like geographically, even as the majority of our population moves into urban environments.

In Bryan’s day and our recent past, this dichotomy did not seriously threaten our cohesion as a nation; in fact, those FM roads connected more than just farmers and our city tables. But now our differences, the other kinds of fences we have put up at home and around the world, have helped to create the calamity of our current leadership.

While I was piloting and pondering, France was rejecting a vision of the world where a nation can only house one type of person, where only the market-makers matter, and where outside interference can amplify those differences and scare people into a frightening, reactionary decision. We were not so careful or clear-headed here, but my hope is that the strong French results will somehow nudge the world back onto the kind of road that connects rather than divides.

Turning Childhood Memories into Wanderlust

30 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by lexklein in Belgium, England, France, Netherlands, Travel - General

≈ 54 Comments

Tags

EUROPE, family travel. wanderlust, memories, road trip, travel with kids, Weekly Photo Challenge

Are we nuts? I scowled at my husband, as we boarded the plane and crammed ourselves and three little kids into the economy seats of a plane bound for London. We had put our farther-flung travels on hold for the toddler years, but now it was time to load everybody up and start seeing the world through fresh young eyes.

We soon found we had nothing to fear. From takeoff that summer day, we discovered our kids were born to travel. They entertained themselves or slept the entire flight, they stayed up all the next day until bedtime, and they believed me when I said there was no such thing as jet lag, spending all of day two on their feet, in the tube, in the parks and museums and churches and shops, and they topped it off with a night at the theater. They were 5, 8 and 10 years old; I have to say I was pretty impressed.

We stayed with friends in London and started some great travel memories, the kind of recollections kids have of their trips, not necessarily the kind adults and travel bloggers write about. They remember minding the gap as we rode back and forth into the city, gawking at the torture devices in the Tower of London, snuggling a new Paddington Bear toy, and the sheer magnitude of choices at the food court at Harrods. They remember the crushing crowds at the theater, but not much about the play. They recall it being scorching hot outside Big Ben and Parliament, but nothing about the places themselves.

Paris was next, via the Eurostar train through the chunnel, a ride that is still remembered for the orange juice that was spilled on my daughter’s white sweater rather than for the transportation wonder that it was. Strongest memory of the Eiffel Tower? The awful pizza – who puts weird mushrooms on pizza, they cried! (Who eats in the Eiffel Tower, we should have been asking.) Continental toilets were the subject of many a journal entry; my oldest was intrigued with the different flushing mechanisms, the water flow, the seats – you name it; he cataloged it.

Notre Dame is remembered for its roof and the winding stairs that got them there; back then you could go the whole way up, and we spent well over an hour looking out over the rooftops, but no one has any memory of going inside. Parisian cuisine? They ordered steak frites or jambon et fromage sandwiches at every single restaurant for every single meal (except for that sad Eiffel Tower pizza). We rented a spacious apartment decades before AirBnb, and they remember … the lobby.

The French countryside brought new delights. What kid would not love Mont St Michel and the idea that we could be stranded there when the tide came in? Forget the abbey; that natural moat was the cool part. Dinard was a charming beach town, but here they had the coziest, whitest beds, all three crammed together in a toile-covered room, and that Grand Hotel may still be their favorite hotel in the world. Monet’s garden delighted my daughter, perhaps in part for its flowers and green benches, but mostly because she remembered she had gotten out of a day of preschool to attend the Monet exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago with me years before. And, to them, the D-Day beaches represented the end of a different kind of World War: a huge fight between mom and dad over asking for directions! (To be honest, that hours-long argument and the driving in circles all over Normandy are my strongest memories of that historic place as well.)

Belgium brought panic and a three-way police lookout when we sailed through a toll area without paying the toll (by accident) and the kids were certain we would be arrested, but it also brought one of the most relaxing afternoons we had, meandering though Bruges, eating chocolates and posing on every little stone bridge we crossed.

Our final destination, the Netherlands, where my brother was living with his family, is somewhat properly remembered for our visit to Anne Frank’s house, an evening canal cruise, and the pannenkoeken houses, but what they would say really sticks in their minds is the stone their cousin threw at our youngest’s head in their backyard. Or the porn movie that came on as my brother tried to change the TV channel. Or the girls in the windows in the red light district, which they struggled to comprehend. Or the topless beach near Scheveningen.

Ahem, there is a theme developing there, but it was a different kind of lust that was growing in the kids on that first big trip. Today, those little tykes have a wanderlust that matches their mother’s, and I think all those mundane memories of other countries were the spark. All three kids spent some portion of their college lives overseas, continued to travel with us for many years, have worked overseas in Israel, Ireland, South Africa, Ghana and Malawi, and now take their own road and train and bus trips, wrangling their friends and significant others to step away from home to create more silly, random memories.