Taking A Stand: Playing with a cactus not smart
The line from “The Wizard of Oz” saying “there’s no place like home” is very true, but it’s something you don’t really realize until you’ve been away for a while.
I recently returned home from my seven-day tour of our great country, a tour which covered 12 states, all four time zones, two countries and about 5,000 miles aboard an extended mini-van along with four friends and two kids. For most people who know me, the prospect of me being on the road for that long was unthinkable since I generally go stir crazy just driving up to Murfreesboro.
However, seeing I’ve been threatening to head out west since my college days, the prospect of actually crossing the Mississippi River was too much to resist. It’s something I’m glad I did, but something I likely won’t do again.
For a trip that long, it started on a questionable note when we arrived to rent the van. It was kind of reminiscent of the Police Chief Brody’s quote in “Jaws” when he declared “we’re going to need a bigger boat.” In this case, there was no way our luggage, let alone our bodies were going to fit in such tight confines. To see us get in and out of the thing was like watching a bunch of clowns pile out of a mini-car at a circus. However, the inability to feel comfortable was soon replaced by the awe of seeing the desert and mountains of the west, that is, after we got through Arkansas and Oklahoma. If you haven’t seen Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, do it some time. It’s something that has to be seen to be believed. The simple act of throwing the football in the Arizona desert amongst the Joshua Trees was something to be remembered.
However, as one of my friends found out, you don’t go out and play with the cactus because they bite. He was pulling souvenirs of his cactus fight out of his hands for hours. You also don’t mess with Texas, as the big billboards warn you. It seems the Texas Highway Patrol likes meeting people. They’ll pull you over, take your name and come back with a citation. This happened to us twice within 20 minutes coming back through the very flat east Texas.
The math is hard to figure. The first time we got pulled over, it was a girl driving around 95 miles per hour in a 75. The trooper let her go with a warning. The next time it was a guy driving our van, doing a measly 85. He got a real ticket for $100. Word of advise, let the girls drive through Texas.
It was after the cactus attacks and brushes with the long arm of the law that the old homesick feeling started hitting me. Sure, the west was beautiful and quite an adventure, but it just wasn’t on par with where we live. Everyone in the van agreed, while the west was beautiful, the best place to live was still Warren County. Even San Antonio’s river walk, the bright lights of Las Vegas, the grandeur of Hoover Dam, the historic streets of Tombstone, the bayous of Louisiana and the gulf shores of Mississippi lacked the natural beauty we have right here.
In case you’re wondering the most memorable places I saw had to include the canyon area near Hoover Dam, the wide open desert of Arizona, the snow capped mountain peaks of New Mexico, the lights of Albuquerque and El Paso and the skyline of Las Vegas. The worst – Arkansas, hands down. We took a southern route home just to avoid going back through.
By the way, if you go west in March, take a jacket. It never got over 55 degrees in Vegas and it was actually raining in the desert when we went through. I didn’t break out the shorts until San Antonio. Go figure, it was warmer here the whole time.
(Duane Sherrill is a reporter for the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].)