Best travel keeps nose to the ground

By NIELA M. ELIASON

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 31, 2001

One of the advantages of being retired is having more time for travel. This means we don't have to fly. We can travel by road, camping out, as quickly or as slowly as we wish. We don't actually camp out. It's more like camping in, using our comfortable 22-foot rig. Our Rialta has a bed, a tiny kitchen, a table and seats for two.

I hate flying: the cramped seating, the communal dry air, the boredom. On the "blue highways," as William Least Heat Moon calls the lesser-used roads, we can see America. On the maps, the highways are often red, not blue, but the idea is to avoid not only airlines, but freeways as much as possible.

It is refreshing to travel across the country, soaking up vistas of fields of wheat, corn, rice, tomatoes, cabbage and sunflowers. Herds of cattle, sheep, sometimes even buffalo, stand against the horizon.

In a South Dakota campground, within view of the Missouri River, we were the only campers except for a large flock of geese. It was a cold, windy night, which explained why we had the terrain to ourselves, but compared to being on an airplane, inhaling infectious diseases from other travelers, this was pure luxury. We cuddled up in our blankets and slept soundly.

That was a couple of years ago, when we still had our VW van. It was of recent origin but looked like the old hippie vans. I asked my friend Sarah Allen to paint flowers on the side. Because of our "flower people" van, drivers on the road would smile and wave to us. This was not only a good way to travel, but we also met a lot of people. We'd pull into a camp site, preferably a woodsy state park, and before we could get the water and electricity hooked up, wistful-looking people would come over and say, "I used to have a van just like this."

One man said he still had his in his back yard. "I couldn't give it up," he said, almost teary.

My husband plays the flute and often sits outside in the evening and practices. A woman walked by one evening as he sat under the trees with soft sounds floating through the greenery. She peered behind our van and saw him. "I thought there were elves in the forest," she said. We don't have the hippie van anymore and don't meet quite so many people.

We travel short days, leaving about 8 a.m. and stopping about 3 p.m. We prefer our own simple cooking to restaurants, and traveling this way instead of staying in motels allows this freedom. After dinner, we have no TV news to watch, so we play gin rummy. I am addicted to reading the newspaper while I eat breakfast, so I buy one when we shop for food at the supermarkets. Then I save the paper and read it the next morning. News is news whenever you get to it.

Supermarkets are our support system. You can get anything in a supermarket, from bananas to duct tape.

Camping isn't perfect. Chiggers can be a problem in the South, but we learned that the best treatment is to paint the bite with nail polish. No more itching. Hair spray works, too. On an airplane, you might have an annoying seat mate, but the problem is not solved with nail polish. Duct tape might work.

Recently, we camped near the American River at Coloma, Calif. We were within walking distance of the very spot where James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill. This is the kind of thing you don't get to do when you fly over the territory on an airplane.

The campground was host to a large group of fourth-grade students who were there to study the Gold Rush as part of their California history class. What a good hands-on assignment. I saw a lot of them at the river panning for gold but heard no cries of discovery.

In the evening, we sat outside and watched the river burble over rocks as the sun went down behind the hills. Three ducks waddled up to offer their regards. A little boy, who was camping nearby with his parents, brought over some homemade s'mores to share with us.

America, the beautiful.

- Write to Niela M. Eliason in care of Seniority, St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731; or send e-mail to Niela@prodigy.net

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