AT: When I was a boy, sometimes my parents would load the family into our old green Rambler and we’d just go for a drive. I don’t know anybody who “goes for drives” anymore, but it was not uncommon in the 1970s. Blame us for global warming if you want to – I cannot bring myself to care. Most of Ohio was pretty safe back then. There were plenty of things to see – small adventures scattered across the sea of green or yellow corn. My job on such trips, more honorary than necessary, was to navigate our travels by the map.
A map, if you happen to be too young to have ever seen a real one, was a huge sheet of paper printed colorfully with roads and points of interest marked by cryptic notes and tiny symbols. Pressing the tiny symbols with your finger did not connect you to anything. There were no web sites in those days. Telephones were solid and heavy devices, some wired securely to the wall at home. They linked to relatives rather than to computers.
You didn’t carry either the world’s wisdom or its idiotic opinions in your pocket. Your eyes and the sheet of paper were all you had to guide you on the road. If you wanted to know what was in Chillicothe, you had to drive to there to find out.
There were, even then, a few holes in the map. Places the old green Rambler dared not go. We didn’t go to the worst parts of nearby cities. It wasn’t that we hated the people who lived there – we were simply realists. Poor neighborhoods are the homes of default for people who, for one reason or another, do not thrive in a modern civilized society. A small fraction of those people really are sociopathic predators. This is just a fact. Violent people without much impulse control just don’t end up in middle-class suburbs unless the government, in its official zeal for “fairness,” plants them there. Even today’s progressives know this, whether they admit it or not. They avoid the slums and ghettos that form substantial sections of all our cities just like everybody else who has a choice. more here
Progressives created the holes in the map.
Oh, drives, I love them! I remember hearing stories about how people “accidentally” ended up in Canada – something I always marveled at and wanted to happen with us. Getting out of our state, however, requires premeditation, but an afternoon drive from one part of Southcentral to another (e.g. to the Mat-Su or Seward, though north tends to be my default direction) can be almost as thrilling if you approach it with the right attitude. Being together is the point, and a hamper of food goes with that, maybe a deck of cards or tablet of paper or a good imagination. So maybe Palmer isn’t exactly an exotic destination, but it’s about an hour away and a drive with someone whose company you enjoy can still be magical if you choose to make it so.
I gots a big ditch to the north of me and Mesiko to the south. Can’t go west on account of California and I’ll have to be on some sort of heavy medication and/or severely restrained before I set foot in New Mesiko to the east.
Mainly we just drive in big circles here in Arizona.
Remember when Obama implanted the ‘poor illegal invading unaccompanied children’ by the thousands, in remote areas of the US: without an ounce of accountability? He brought Muslim ‘refugees’ by the thousands to America, and purposefully planted them in ‘red’ states.
Will we ever know all of the holes that demon faux president left open? The black fungus spores of obamination are spreading in places of which we are unaware. Some call it the ‘deep state’. I think if it like the black mold hiding between you walls, destroying your Heath and home, without your knowledge, until discovered.
President Trump has made huge progress in ‘spot cleaning’ but in order to really irradiate the ‘obamination/communist black mold’ that permeates our government, he has to tear out the rot, treat the clean areas and rebuild.
‘A map, if you happen to be too young to have ever seen a real one’.
ZING!
Love the truth in this,,,
And we gave road maps away for free at my dad’s gas station back in those days to our customers if they needed one.
This article isn’t really about maps and road trips. The entire article on American Thinker is a MUST read. Quote from the article:
“They were not blown here in some unavoidable freak storm, nor did they wander here in search of missing livestock. They were certainly not brought here centuries ago as hapless and unwilling slaves.”
As Alan Stang used to say, think about it.
That feeling one gets while driving in a scenic area enjoying the beautiful views and then come upon the sight of a scattering of litter and garbage wantonly tossed that completely destroys the scenery.
Even now the desolation and hopeless feelings one has when driving thru small towns and villages in West Virginia, Maryland (Western part of state), and Pennsylvania with boarded up stores, abandoned homes, dilapidated building fronts – life has changed in America whether we like it or not.
We still have lots of room for productive legal immigrants who want to taste the American Dream and we can’t provide it because of those who are stealing it away.
Add in the politicians who no longer have the vision or guts and woe to America.
Progressives want to control ever aspect of our lives and pass regulations to make everything illegal except Illegals!
In other woids, turn us all into California!
Take me back to party lines and rotary dials where we didn’t have Dipshits calling us every 15 minutes try to tell us that the extended car warrantee (that we never bought) is about to expire!
…my dad was old school.
He and my mom used to take us just for a drive, quite often growing up.
All 6 of us would climb into the car and we would just drive around with music playing and the windows down.
…
My wife and I still go for drives every Sunday. Most times we take the same route and look for bald eagles that have been making a comeback here in Indiana. The drive only lasts a little more than an hour, but we both enjoy it.
Growing up, at one time we had a 1959 Rambler (tan with brown trim and the push button automatic).
My senior year we had a green 1963 Rambler (v8 and 3 on the tree stick). Dad always tracked his mileage in his little log book, which I do today with all my cars (old habits are hard to break). When I’d tool around Central Florida hitting 90+ in the Rambler, I’d sometimes add a few gallons (only around 30 cents a gallon) and not record it in the book. Dad thought that the MPG was improving. Probably wouldn’t have been too good on the mpg at those speeds.
I hope that your fathers would at least have stopped every once in a while to take a restroom break on road trips. My dad was notorious for making sure that my 3 brothers and I would all go before we left so he wouldn’t have to stop unless it was an emergency. In fact he made one of my brothers pee into a jar in the back seat of our 53 Packard by kneeling behind the seats and my brother gave it to my mom who tossed the pee out of the open window right back into the open back window smacking one of my brothers right in the face. Road trips were never a dull moment with us since we went to visit my grandparents at least twice a month and drove for 3 or more hrs. to get from Ephrata, Wa. to CDA, Id. My favorite road trip was going down to Wallowa, Or. S. of Lewiston, Id. about a hundred miles down thru Rattlesnake Grade (about 25-30 mi. up and down into Oregon) to the bottom of the Grand Ronde River down and up the other side to Wallowa to visit my mom’s sister and my cousins. Rattlesnake Grade is one of the twistiest narrow roads with sheer drop-offs to the river below and quite a few low speed hairpin corners and few or inadequate guard rails but it’s a beautiful drive. My wife hated that road because she always sat on the right looking down over the side of the road, it’s not a road for the faint of heart.
My grandmother had a Rambler with the push-button shift. She kept that car in great shape.
Wife and I still go on drives.
Just to see what we can see.
No cities, though.
Beautiful country, hereabouts, and you can be in some really wild-looking areas that are only a couple of miles from civilization. There’s a back-road to the dump (Recycling Center) from the Highway, that, you’d swear, you were in the outback of West Virginia or Arkansas – but you’ve never left the city limit.
America really is a beautiful country – if only we can preserve it (from the illegal-alien invaders and the nihilistic totalitarians) for our chillens and gran-chillens.
izlamo delenda est …
In honor of MLK Day tomorrow, every white person should take a drive down your local MLK Blvd just to show the little kids what white people look like.
Darn, I gotta work tomorrow and there’s no MLK Blvd. in Lewiston, Id. Maybe some roads named after Indians since it’s Nez Perce country but no MLK Blvd.
Buy a motorcycle and re-discover the awesomeness of just going for a drive. Back when I was a kid, we’d go for a drive just to see what we could see. Public parks free of trash, feces and needles. Playgrounds with kids trying to swing OVER the bar, swinging on the monkey bars while the Dads grilled burgers on the park BBQs. Sometimes you might even run into a local carnival with rides. My folks dragged us to antique stores, to look at a new house, visit some relatives. If we behaved we might get treated to a pizza or maybe get to eat in one of those all chrome diners with the vinyl booths complete with its own mini-jukebox. Good times……
If you haven’t, read the whole article.
“They did not aspire to be Americans in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. We have seen them, and we are not that stupid.”
^^^^ This! 100% this!
I first witnessed this in CA where you could drive from one zipcode to the next and it would be like crossing 3 or 4 different national borders.
El Salvador to Korea, China, India, Mexico… No English signage, language. Arnold Schwartzenegger said the same thing and then got slammed for it. Of course, he’s a little girly man now.
Lost his balls to Maria and the steroids, he did.
Has anyone made a ‘Prog’ map yet? I mean, besides the voting districts.
My Scoutmaster was the Cartographer for the State of Oregon. Nobody in our Boy Scout troop ever got lost.