Blog 2518 – 09.17.2022

The Romance Of The Road

I believe that we are all, even the most sedentary of us, space and time travelers. I watched most of a a History Channel series yesterday called The Cars That Made America and noted that one of the many great lines regarding Americans long love affair with automobiles is that before it’s invention most people in these United States never traveled more than fifty miles from where they were born in their lifetime. In all those several hours of homage paid to the automobile makers and their inventions and all the miles of paved roads and improvements they brought about there was no mention of the fact that not only did we pave paradise and put up a parking lot, but that we have probably done more mayhem to ourself and the animal population with cars and trucks than with guns and ammo. For over a hundred years we have been on a course of suicide sucking on the tailpipe of millions of automobiles and forces our children and all the world to breath those fumes as well.

This beautiful blue ball that we are hurling through space and time on is reeling from those noxious fumes not just from the factories and refineries that continue to produce the steel and fuel for them, but all the other parts that go into producing and maintaining our favorite mode of transportation, the automobile.

I am not advocating that we go back the horse drawn vehicles. Sweeping up all their droppings was also a form of pollution, and the smell, well, it must have been atrocious, but I am in favor of electric cars and trucks for individual use and a better, cleaner, more reliable mass transit system and hey let us not take teleportation off the table.

I am as author Samuel Clements, better known as Mark Twain, said still very much an advocate of travel for all the reasons he numerates in the quote below:

Much as I like walking and riding my bike, I am as my generation, the baby boomers, still addicted to motor vehicles and the romance of the open road. Little gets my heart pumping more than the thought of venturing down, up or over some road that I have yet to travel. “Road Trip” are two of my favorite words.

Happy motoring as the old commercial used to say.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YA0WtFXxH6OJLwfJ9lovDSRn19dFnS6p/view?usp=drivesdk

The Highwayman