The Weekly Walk With Me

Google tells me it's International Women's Day.  I would have prepared something but I feel like my own weekend was celebration enough.
I love road trips. If I can get there in 10 hours or less, I'm putting a clean pair of underwear in my pocket and getting behind the wheel. So when I got the itch this weekend that's exactly what I did.  I set out on a drive to connect with some family-mostly crazy women with even crazier stories to tell. And now more than ever I'm interested in hearing them.  I  don't know a lot of details about my mother's side of the family.  I know the basics, the most important bits, but she doesn't talk about them and in 38 years she's never allowed me to finish a sentence. What I do know I learned from my favorite great aunt. She was always more of a grandmother than my Bubbie.  She's in her seventies now, and round and squishy and I just want to lay on her.  So on Friday night, wifeless and with no schedule to keep, I hit the road.

The 8 Best Things About a Road Trip

8. Junk food.

7. Places like this:

6. With bathrooms like this.  (I know. I would've figured out a way to steal it, but that leads me to number 5.)

5. Locals always watching because "you're just not from around here."  Actually this kinda happens to me in my own neighborhood too, but it's more fun when you have a legit reason to be ogled. Which leads me to number 4:

4. Nope, I'm not from around here.  So when I travel I use foreign accents.  Maybe they're good, maybe not-I've never auditioned for Downton Abbey or anything- but they tend to work on gas station attendants.

3. The Road Trip Radio Flip
I love listening to the radio in the car.  I will scan to anything with even a hint of a signal.  Radio really does tell me a lot about a town that seems worlds away from my own.  (Not to mention what a rock star I become on the highway.)  What are they listening to, where's the bar, what's the demographic?  How many strip clubs are in this town?  But beware of something I like to call Tricky Jesus.  You think you've found something palatable only to realize a Christian youth minister in an Affliction shirt is serenading you with all the sins you're trying to speed away from.

2. Solitude.

1. Sleeping diagonally on a king size bed.