Any time you hit the road in a rented car with a handful of people, there’s a good chance hands will curl into fists. After all, not everybody has the same idea of a “good time,” right?
I learned that lesson decades ago when my wife and I took off with her sister and husband for a few weeks in England and Europe.
Now, I’m as happy as the next guy to spend hours roaming shopping meccas like Harrods—which is not very happy at all. But you give in for the sake of your wife’s happiness.
At least for a while.
And I’m willing to endure yet another tour where Elizabethan-clad lasses explain that some famous guy centuries ago spent some time in some famous building doing whatever it is that centuries-dead famous dudes did back then. At least for a while.
And I’ll choke down yet another meal where the curried couscous is to die for, and the pressed duck is pressed better than any duck ever hoped to be pressed.
For a while.
But then my inner itch to do something-else-for-the-love-of-God will rage forth, and by the time I am finished ranting, a small European compact car is the one place we can all agree is the wrong place to be.
And so it was an act of genius when someone suggested we simply take turns day after day.
On Monday, one of us would be the official tour guide, making every decision for the day. No complaints of any sort would be allowed from the others.
On Tuesday, it would be somebody else’s turn to guide.
And so on.
And so forth.
I volunteered to be the last one to guide the group. You might call it generosity. My wife would call it a desire to let my revenge swell to monumental proportions until even I was prepared to endure a full day of the misery of my choices just knowing that it would be dwarfed by enough collected misery from the others to cause a small European compact car to go nuclear. A clear act of “tourrorism.”
But before you condemn me to whatever Gitmo they send vengeful tourists, let me explain:
See, when I travel, I don’t want to gape at tour guides clad in period costumes, surrounded by fat Americans with Nikons and fanny packs. I don’t want to haunt the aisles of a rickety department store with squiggly-letter prices rather than dollar signs just so someday I can return home and spark a conversation with the words, “Oh, this old thing? I got it in London.” I don’t want to spend a breathless hour at the Louvre to give us enough time to “do” the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and Champs Elysses by lunchtime.
No, when I travel, I like to meet the real people of the land I’m visiting: The guy going to work at the coal-yard. The lady hanging her wash in the yard. The kids fishing for eels in the river. I like to match my pace to theirs.
That’s why, when it was my turn to lead the group, I announced, “Today will be a white-road day!”
In England, which is where we were at the time, white roads are the least-developed roads listed on a map. I had recently read a book called “Blue Highways” which recounts the author’s tour around America using only blue roads, the American version of the same thing. That author—William Least Heat Moon—discovered the “real” America.
I wanted to do the same thing in Europe, even if only for a day. We would spend my day traveling only on white roads.
Though the morning started with enough grumbling in the car that I was tempted to pull over to check the transmission, by noon we had chatted with four lovely older ladies strolling arm-in-arm down a small village street on their way to church choir practice. They invited us for kidney pie in the centuries-old stone cottage where one of them had lived her entire life.
Later we found a place on the map where four white roads converged toward each other but never met. After driving down a narrow hedge-shadowed lane, our road ended at a tall, grassy hill where farmers brought their sheep to graze—the blank spot on the map. One man told us while puffing his pipe that his great-great-many-times-great grandfather grazed his flock centuries ago at that very spot.
Following his directions, we drove to Hettie Pegler’s Tump, a 4,000-year-old stone burial cairn so remote, the only sign of civilization was a tin can on a post with a hand-lettered sign asking if you wanted to donate a few coins to pay for candles that stood on a stone by the fence in case you didn’t have a flashlight as you crawled on your belly into the ancient, unlit cave.
Near the end of the day as we raced sunset over a pint in a pub, we wondered how to find the Rollright Stones, which another man had suggested to us. It is an ancient Neolithic circle of about a hundred stones — nobody can agree on the true number. But a man at the next table overheard us and harrumphed. He warned us in an ominous voice to stay away from there.
As a child, he said, he delivered loaves of bread in the area on a horse-drawn cart. One day he decided to count the stones by placing a loaf of bread atop each one. He had started out with a hundred loaves, and after all stones were topped, he had four left. So that settled it, he thought — 96 stones.
But when he gathered up all the loaves again and put them back in the cart, he no longer had a hundred loaves of bread.
He finished off his pint and rose to leave the pub. “I had a hundred and two,” he whispered with a shudder of horror.
Now I ask you, how could Westminster Abbey ever beat a day like that?
• Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
