I'm "Tired" And I Wanna Go Home...

Lying on his side on the burning pavement of Rte 40 West, about half way to Memphis from Nashville, Lance tried to rip away what was left of his front bumper and drain pan under the engine compartment of his beloved 2007 Toyota Prius. After three thousand uneventful miles, a five foot piece of discarded tire tread had come shooting out from between the wheels of a tractor trailer at 70 miles an hour and ripped away the front lower bumper, bent the radiator support bar, demolished most of the four foot square molded plastic pan beneath the engine thereby causing it to rub against the pavement sounding like the end of the world was imminent. Fortunately, the flying tread hadn't bounced higher or Lance would not be blogging right now.

Lost in a reverie of thought all morning, Lance had been listing lessons learned on the road during his past month as he drove past Natchez Trace, across the Tennessee River, and headed for the Mississippi. Here were a few of his gleanings:

- Go to the bathroom at every opportunity. You never know when there won't be one.
- There are more sexual aids/love toys/undergarment fashion stores in the South than in the North, or at least their signs are bigger.
- Lance found that two meals a day on the road, with a extra large ice tea at noon, is quite sufficient.
- Never trust the hotel clock, TV remote, wake-up messages or shower temperature indicator. They are built to break or lie.
- No matter where you are, be sure to book a hotel room before 3:30 p.m. or you are tempting fate. Even then, there will be a monster motorcycle rally, a city-wide arts festival or a Paul McCartney Concert taking up all the rooms within a 45 minute drive of wherever you didn't make early reservations.
- In every hotel room, there is at least one, small repetitive sound you didn't notice until you turned off the lights. It will go on and on, all night. It will disappear by daylight.

Then, Lance started to see some "truths of the road" that might apply to life back home, at least metaphorically:

- Just like in in our cars, there is always a Directions Lady speaking in our ear...but she is inside, not outside of us. She has a route planned for our daily life and if we don't follow it, she glares at us and intones "RECALCULATING..." and then keeps on muttering to us. She tells us to play it safe. Don't rock the boat. Color within the lines. Say what they want to hear. There is no OFF switch. SHE also comes as a HE, for those who prefer. She usually sounds a lot like...us.

- Lance may think he is the center of the universe, but when he is alone on the road, he is insignificant to those around him...and sometimes to the people he left back home. He is not the center of the universe. He is his own universe, orbiting his own ego and imagining that everyone senses the great gravity of what he is thinking when actually, they don't. Lance found that realization both freeing and damning.

- Warren Buffet said, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." Traveling alone, Lance travels light and goes fast. But because he is blogging to others as he goes, the mental distance being covered during the trip is multiplied by all the people he is taking with him, far exceeding the absolute miles covered. Time and again, Lance would take a picture, glance around and sadly realize he was having these experiences alone. Beyond his own faltering memory, without the photos and the blog there would literally be nothing tangible remaining when he got home. (If the tree falls in the forest...and all that.) The journey of Lance's life is not about sights seen or miles covered. It's about thoughts dreamed and expressed, opinions discussed and discarded, and love lost, then found. All of that required company at some point if he would travel far.

- Every time Lance passed a hitch hiker (and there were far fewer than he remembered from his youth..) he spent the next hundred miles imagining the conversation he WOULD have had with them if he picked them up. Of course, he never actually did, not even the women. It wasn't because of safety issues, but because he feared he would be trapped for some undetermined length of time having to entertain or counsel them (he couldn't help himself.) On one hand, Lance jealously guarded his new found independence, but on the other he would still construct an imaginary dialogue with the person and always ended up regretting not accepting the invitation to new perspectives they may have brought with them. How many times a day do we pass up the "hitch hikers" in the hallways, at the cafeteria, at events or even on the street, Lance wondered, and then complain about the lack of adventure in our lives.

- Lance realized he is currently and unabashedly living at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy on this venture. He's got the Physiological, Safety, Love/Belonging, and Esteem well-covered, albeit much of it purchased on a Platinum American Express Card. At the top step of the pyramid lies Self-actualization usually characterized by morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice and acceptance of facts. Literally not worried about the basics, Lance found himself engaged full-time in chasing those very qualities in his mind. Lance was seeing what it was like to make a life, not just a living, and he was beginning to appreciate the difference.

Well, all of this is pretty much what he was thinking when "the rubber met his road" and ripped out the underside of his car. Tumbling down the Hierarchy pyramid all the way back to the baseline of physiological and safety issues, Lance now lay mere feet from whizzing tractor trailers, trying to decide if his trip was over and if bad karma had finally caught up to him. Then, just as suddenly, he remembered a note he had written to himself last night in the hotel room, "The body travels, only the spirit soars."

Re-fortified, he jammed the broken pieces up into the grill; used his iPhone to call ahead to a Toyota shop in Memphis; called his insurance agent back home to arrange for repairs on Friday morning; drove a conservative 60 miles an hour for the next two hours into Memphis where the nice mechanic cut away the broken parts and bound everything loose with plastic ties to get him home. Now, Lance could drive back to Washington over the next two days, just as envisioned, and Lance still made it to downtown Memphis for the famous Rendezvous ribs, to Graceland for the Elvis Mansion tour, and then drove the four hours back to Nashville carefully avoiding the dreaded death tread where ever he saw it. Looking back over the day, Lance knew that both trips- body and mind - were well worth it.

The body may travel, but the spirit MUST be allowed to soar. That is a keeper, he grinned.