Road trips: what's so bad about winging it, and improvising, hunh?

Thanksgiving is over, and many of us have done a bit of travel...
Xmas is approaching, and maybe we'll do it again.
A few more thoughts about 'travel' are appropriate.. or at least,'potentially relevant'...
hope you enjoy the following thoughts.

I recently read this:
"Apps of the week: Getting there from here"
By Cody McCloy, CNN
November 11, 2009 12:22 p.m. EST

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/11/navigation.apps.review/

It seems to be all about the various 'digital things' (GPS, etc?) one can use on a a road trip, to guide you along the way.

It struck me as being... well... really strange, and 'not what road trips should be about' - at least not for me.

My perspective is, of course, from my childhood - born in 1951, growing up in New Hampshire and Maine thru the 50's.
There was no interstate hiway, you got this thing called a map, on paper.... and you followed it, as best you could.
Most roads were two lanes, with a single dotted white line down the middle, at best.
My hometown was Gardiner, Maine, a few miles south of the state capitol, Augusta.
My Dad liked to take us all on road trips, and once we took one to Quebec City, driving through the Maine back roads to Canada.

Soooo... we set out.... and the road got narrower, and the signs fewer, and soon, we didn't know where in the hell we were.
My Dad?...he just kept on driving...that's the kind of guy he was - fearless, even when the gas gauge in the car was at "Empty!)"...
"shut up, kids, we'll get there"... (and we always did).
My mom was in the front seat, she was the most nagging 'back seat driver' you would ever want to know.
She was sure we were doing nothing but getting more & more lost.
(Sorry, Mom, if you can read any of this from 'the other side' ! - i think you would agree...but I would never hold any of this against you! - Dad needed an alter-ego, and you did it well!)

And ya know what?... after a while, the road signs stopped being in english, and were, instead, in french!
"Voulez-vous Gitanes? Gaulouse? Arretez ici!" (French branded cigarettes, "stop here!")...stuff like that.

('Toto, we're not in Maine anymore, are we!?!')

We drove into Canada, without passing any customs, or anything similar.
And we ended up in Quebec city just fine.

I take the same approach (for obvious reasons!) to road trips - just get out there, and drive!
I did exactly that about a decade or so ago, in Arizona.... and the images I stumbled into?... were marvelous.
I just woke up in some cheapo-motel in Arizona, got some bad gas station coffee, smoked half a joint, and drove...
I passed thru this burned-out and deserted town,...and took a few frames that have served me very, very well.



The best montage image to come from this, is one of my best, of all time:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/art/edge.fp.html

Another time I took a side trip on the way home (S.F.) from the desert (the Mojave/Joshua Tree) to check out Lake Isabella.
... which wasn't all that interesting to me, photographically...
but the drive down into the CA. central valley on Rte 178 (totally unexpected!) was awesome!

http://www.californialandscapephoto.com/KRGorge/KR_Gorge_TNs.html

Another few words about road trips/travel:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/11/18/bluehighways/index.html
Back-road adventurer on America's 'Blue Highways'

William Least Heat-Moon, best-selling author of "Blue Highways," "River-Horse," and most recently "Roads to Quoz," shared his insights on the American road with CNN. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.
November 18, 2009 3:28 p.m. EST

An Excerpt:

'...Go with a loose sense of destination....'

"Everybody in this nation, in the Americas, we all are descendants of people who came from the other hemisphere, each of us a descendant of travelers. Movement is in our blood....
To speak metaphorically, we seem to carry a travel gene that makes us want to move.
And a lot of us also carry an active curiosity gene.
We're bears that go over the mountain to see what we can see.
Speed is anathema to deep travel.
If you want to learn the territory between your place of departure and where you end up, you have to have time and use it wisely."

Well said, I agree.
I say 'to hell with *figuring out* where you're going, just go somewhere' -
the place you don't know about might just be a lot better than the place you thought you wanted to go.
(That's also true about life in general.)

"Celebrating the world's worst travel disasters"?
by: Spud Hilton
Sunday, November 15, 2009 - SFGate.com
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/13/TRA918K0C8.DTL

(Right on topic, here :-), check it out, especially all the added comments!)

More from Spud's blog:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/travel/detail?entry_id=52286&type=travel

And of course, something in the New York Times:
(The Grand Canyon during winter)

http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/travel/29canyon.html

This'll be the last entry of the year - time to take a break - coming up at the beginning of 2010 - a bit of darkroom - "A Desert(ed) Heart".
You can get a preview in the '2009' section of my site: www.bobbennettphoto.net/2009
Have a great holiday!

Dead end road...?

(Above is one of my 'photoshop sketches' of this one.)

I don't know... is this a dead end, or isn't it?
I'm not sure. I'm not sure it's the right title for the image, but I don't have a better one.
I guess it could be a dead end... or... you could drive right on thru the opening, couldn't you?
(But you better not be yakking on a cell phone, or texting, if you are gonna negotiate this road!)

And if you did drive thru the opening, where would you be then?
Too many questions, too few answers. I like it that way.
You're not gonna find too many hard and fast answers in a place where rocks turn into clouds, are you?
Sometimes my prints are a riddle, even to me.
I wrote a statement of sorts, 25+ years ago, which remains true, and that's surprising to me.
I don't whether it means I am on a 'steady and true course'... or whether I am stuck in the mud.
Whatever it is, it is.
(Fortunately, I have a 'better than part-time' day job, and some inheritance income, I don't have to worry about paying the bills w/ my photo work, I can do as I please, & follow my muse. I didn't plan it that way, but am glad it has worked out the way it has.
You won't catch me driving a Jaguar...but you won't stumble over me begging for a change on the streets of SF, either. :-) )

The statement goes like this:

"I think it was Robert Rauschenberg (correct me, someone/anyone, if my attribution is wrong) who said it best - " It starts by YOU telling the picture what it will be -- in the end, THE PICTURE tells you what IT will be...".
I feel like I take that approach..... Not through any 'great design', or dogmatic adherence, ... it's just the way that comes 'naturally'.... and that is all I am interested in.

I collect negatives by taking myself, and simple camera, to places I love - the California coast, and desert - and start walking.....and .. "things happen" ....
I spend a lot of time with my proof sheets, and in a small room, under a dim red bulb. I'm obviously interested in things metaphysical - beyond that, it's up to the viewer to decide what's going on.
( If I haven't figured them out yet, (and I haven't, not *really*), why should I presume to explain them to anyone else?)
Many of the pictures just seem to 'happen', because the individual negatives are 'looking' for each other.
I'm just a chaperone, and a really loose one at that......
...But those were always the best kind of parties, right? "

As usual, more/larger images on a page at my website:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2009/DeadEnd/index.html