Road Tripping: The Self-Torture of More, More, More
How many times have you been here in your life? Left or right? The blue pill or the red pill? Whatever choice you make puts a different chain of events in to motion.
Right = Hotel
Left = More, more, more
When I’d reached this sign it was dinner time – the time of the day when it would be smart for me to think about packing it in and finding a hotel. If I chose going to the right a nice relaxing evening awaited. Naturally, I chose left.
According to the EXIF data I took this picture at 5:40pm. According to my camera roll, my last photo of the day was another 2 hours later and it would be at least another hour on top of that when I finally zeroed in on a hotel. This left or right was the point that “well, since I’m in the neighborhood” became a little too obsessive.
Save for eating some trail mix and a banana in gas station parking lot, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast at the Wellsboro Diner. My mood is the first thing to suffer when I don’t eat properly. I go from being happily curious to becoming anxious about things that are easily dealt with under normal, sufficiently hydrated circumstances.
Generally speaking, I don’t get crazy about finding a place to stay, the weather, or focus on a random smell that passes through the air. But when being more tired and hungry than I care to admit to myself factor in – I become ridiculous. (What’s that smell? Is that burning? Is my bike on fire? Those look like tornado clouds. What if every hotel from here to Florida is booked?)
This self-torturing ritual is something that I go through when I travel alone. I think it might be my way of trying to wring every last drop out of the day. Very often I feel like my day-to-day life is stationary so when I get out and get free it’s hard to reel myself in from trying to see more, more, more.
Besides, why would I want to waste time sitting in a well air-conditioned hotel or drinking an ice-cold beer in a restaurant when I could be out riding through clouds of bugs in the quickly approaching dark, dodging critters and Bigfoot and werewolves?
That has been my hardest choice…whether to stay on my original intended route or to detour. The detour has been the best mis-adventures. Just remember to stop and eat…those local hole in the wall places are the best food and the best people you’ll ever meet.
Yea – local mom & pop places often tell the real story of a place. Though sometimes I can’t help but feel like an interloper. They KNOW you arent from there and it can feel like I’m eavesdropping 🙂
Right or left, that is not really a decision is it? Seems like a no brainer if there is still a few hours of daylight left!
Um, yeahhhh – I’m going to go ahead and not take advice on this point from someone who rides 1,000 miles a day for 11 days straight for fun
I get your point, having faced similar choices many times. We all make decisions for ourselves. I remind myself that the reason I’m out there is to have fun, so when the fun stops, I should too. There’s no reason to push into drudgery.
Fuzz, I can totally relate: I experience occasional spells of on-the-road anxiety. I can only attribute it to my tendency to skip breaks for food and drinks, often for the entire day. I suppose that it’s that blasted law of inertia: Objects at rest tend to stay at rest; objects in motion… Well, they just tend to keep motating.