I-Spy

One of the challenges of driving long distances is keeping oneself entertained. Those of us that grew up in the United States and are of a certain age (the age before airplanes turned into Greyhound busses) remember those fateful family road trips. Most things were bigger back then. Station wagons were bigger, families were bigger, the fistfights and arguments about how many bottles of beer had fallen off the wall were bigger - everything was bigger. It was that or we were smaller.

Then things changed. Not that this is a nostalgic whine, but somewhere over the generation that slipped between our childhood and our children’s, things became smaller. The world got smaller, our car trips became smaller, even Mount Rushmore got smaller. I base this on the fact that one of my kids said (after being driven from Boston to South Dakota on nothing less than an atavistic joy ride), “It looks kind of small, Dad.” Well, it was much bigger in North by Northwest.

But there are still miles of undriven road, unimproved road, unpaved road - out there. Those of us unwilling or unable to leave the back seat of our parent’s old Ford Country Squire crave the prospect of nothing but blue sky and endless rounds of I-Spy. Thankfully we have the breadth of Asia to look forward to. Roll on UB!