Road Trips: Travels Here and There
By Thad
When I recently wrote about driving to Key West, it brought to mind a lot of road trips that I have taken over the years. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the trips at this time, but I thought I might reminisce a bit about some of them.
I guess the first one I really remember is a trip I took at the age of seven. My mother loaded us up in her 1955 Chevrolet and headed from Culloden, Georgia to Azle, Texas. One of my strongest memories is of the lady who travelled with us hiding her head under the dashboard when we crossed Lake Pontchartrain in the middle of the night.
Another memory of that trip is my insisting that I wanted to go to San Antonio to see the Alamo. My aunt and uncle tried to explain to me how big Texas was and how far it was from Fort Worth to San Antonio. Explanations were all in vain for a seven year old who was a gigantic Davy Crockett fan. We made the trip. I was pretty surprised to find out I was not ordering pie Alamo, but pie a la mode.
Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports
Spur of the moment trips are great fun also. At one point,the company that I worked for had Atlanta Braves season tickets. If a customer did not use the tickets I often was given the gift of the unused seats. One spring training season I started bugging the sales rep in our office about when I would be getting some tickets. He went up front to his office and came back with two tickets for that Saturday night in West Palm Beach, Florida. Needless to say I made the trip in my trusty Gremlin, leaving Saturday morning and returning to Atlanta on Sunday.
Washington, D.C.
Speaking of my trusty 1970 AMC Gremlin, it took a road trip from Atlanta to Denver. It also travelled from Atlanta to Mont Tremblant in Quebec by way of Chicago, Detroit, Toronto and Montreal. We traveled home via New York City and Washington D.C. straight back to Atlanta.
As a family, we have taken numerous road trips. Some of our favorites were taken while we visited England and Europe. In London we rented a small car and tried our hand at driving on the “wrong” side of the road and learned all about roundabouts. We left London to visit Stonehenge for a great daytrip. We shopped in a village nearby for food and picnicked in the fields around Stonehenge.
Stonehenge
We left London for Mons, Belgium which is another story to be told at another time. In Belgium we took a daytrip with my uncle to Bruges,Belgium. Bruges is called the “Venice of the North,” because of its lovely canals. We later took a daytrip to Bastogne, Belgium where we met with some of our Texas cousins and enjoyed pizza in an open air café.
A trip we took that was a bit less fun was our disastrous trip from Atlanta to Conroe, Texas. The drive isn’t bad, but when you replace the transmission twice in the same Dodge Caravan in a one week span and end up having to fly home from Houston, well, it does not go in the books as a great road trip. I did get to see Cut and Shoot, Texas though!
We often drive from Atlanta to the Massanutten Mountain Resort which is just outside Harrisonburg, Virginia in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. This is a great trip to take because of the lovely drive through the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia. You can also take a day trip to Washington, D.C. from Harrisonburg. Or you can enjoy history in the town of Lexington, Virginia with a visit to Stonewall Jackson’s home, Robert E. Lee’s burial site and the universities of Washington and Lee and the Virginia Military Academy. There are caverns and battlefields to visit in this area also.
Mountain Road into tunnel
We have taken road trips to Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Missouri, Alabama and just about every back road in the state of Georgia.
I guess you could say I am fond of driving. You could also say I am not too fond of paying the cost of flying. Whatever the reason, I firmly suggest that you enjoy the scenic beauty of our country by taking a road trip.
Next: Destination: Key West, Florida