I have two life-long passions, road trips and Dungeons and Dragons. I used to play Disc Golf a while back, but started hurting my elbow, and I stopped. There is a blog dedicated to my D&D, here: Tales from Midlands. This one is about my journeys and explorations.
I love to walk in the woods and drive with music playing, along the back-roads, wherever they happen to be. I got a good union job that works in shifts and rotating days off. I am also a Rail-fan, but not so much into trains and locomotives, though I love to watch freight diesels in action, I am more into walking along the lost highway of the railroad tracks and exploring the surrounding landscape. Rivers, railroad tracks, roads and highways, they all tell a story in terms of the landscape, man-made and natural, that surrounds them. I like to follow those stories. There are four states of tranquility while walking along the trail or following a path: There is the natural beauty of your surroundings; and the comfort you feel in your gear, from essentials, like a pair of good walking shoes and your trusty old jacket that will keep you dry and warm to those little extras, such as that WW-I cigarette case that you picked up for five bucks at a flea market that has your initials and can only hold unfiltered cigarettes, which makes your walk such an extreme pleasure. As you walk along the path, all sorts of thoughts, feelings and stories will bounce off each other inside that echo chamber that is your mind. landscapes will trigger memories and sometimes nostalgia; and there will always be the mystery of what lays beyond that turn in the path and the mystery of that abandoned building.
There are several ways in which to experience a landscape. You can walk it, and you can drive it in the car or ride through it as a passenger, or experience it from a train, a plane or a helicopter. Google Earth is a cheap and mostly adequate substitute for hiring a private plane and making an outing of it. Certain gear is essential for supporting this wanderlust. You need a good roadster. A large car with a big engine that can eat the miles on the highway. Mine is a ’96 Buick Regal two door coupe with a big block GM engine and the streamlined grace, inspired by the Chevy Monte-Carlo of old and the attack angles of the WW2 Tiger tank! I need my music for those long road trips. I been buying vinyl as a ‘tween, then cassette tapes, then Music CD's and finally downloadable MP-3 content (When I have no other choice). A small gym bag full of cassette tapes and CDs used to be a must, accompanying me on all road trips, but now all is digitized onto my I-Pod classic, 160 Gigs worth of music and I still hadn't run out of space, though I hadn't digitized my cassette tapes and records yet. The best part of it is that you can take it on the train with you and listen to mood music as the landscape floats past your window. You need a full size pair of earphones to faithfully reproduce the sound. I don't know why the Beats headphones are popular, since they don't get the perfect fit over the ears. I got a set of high quality Pioneer studio earphones for thirty bucks and they do just fine. Another favored piece of gear is the spill proof thermos coffee cup. It keeps the tea hot in the winter and ice water cold in the summer. I always bring a camera with me. My parents got me a Minolta XG-1 on my 17th Birthday, and I have been taking photos since. Around 2007, it became too expensive to buy and develop film, and I went for a digital camera. I ended up with a Canon Powershot SX-10 IS, which has an amazing 80x zoom and night vision capabilities. This expanded my photographic range beyond belief, and the final essential piece of gear is my Lowe-Pro Passport Sling camera bag, looks like a stylish male satchel purse, it has a padded camera and lens double compartment, a few pockets, and enough room for the spare batteries, my thermos cup, reading material, snacks and a hat gloves, sunglasses kind of stuff. Essential for trips by the railroad. I heard about this bag, went to a very professional very famous camera shop in Manhattan, they tried to sell me crappier and more expensive bags, and then I found what I was looking for in Wal-Mart!
I live on the edge of New York City, and NYC boasts the top commuter rail systems in the US: Long Island Railroad (LIRR) ranked #1 largest in the US; Metro-North Railroad, ranked #4; New Jersey Transit, ranked #2; and Philadelphia’s SEPTA, ranked at #5. New York City is a great place to go exploring by the railroad. One of the immediate pluses of taking the rail to your next hike is that you left your car keys home and you can drink all you want, anywhere you like. I love walking, urban and rural, and I am at my happiest, when I walk from point A to point B, taking picturesque photos as I go.
I am fortunate to be doing the job I love, so I don’t mind going to work, but I still look for my days off. That’s when I go roaming, if the money and weather permit. If, not, then I get to hang around my place. It’s a studio that has two things that I really appreciate – a big, big picture window overlooking some trees, and it’s roomy with a lot of closet space for all my gear. My father taught me to go backpacking train my cardio to improve my distance running. Habit took, and I also developed fondness for going on road trips that went nowhere in my car. I used as an inspiration for writing adventure stories, and music a big part of it, but then I stopped writing, and road trips remained. Like a herd of zombies in the Walking Dead, I kept following the sound of noise I had forgotten a long time ago, charting the same trajectories along the same suburban and semi-rural highways, like Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins charting his favorite walks. Eventually the forest became the sea of green, where I washed away all the stress from work. Career failed. Writing became a dream. My dad became too old for nature walks and day hikes. I was still getting high off the two hour rides set to music and the familiar landscapes, whose photos I had stopped taking having photographed them a million times already. I was an outsider living in a world of suburbanites and haunting commuter rail stations among other things. I was living as a bear in my quiet and comfy den with the loneliness and longing washing over me in waves. Then I met and seduced or did she seduce me, my wifey. She is into Bears (four legged ones, who hibernate in the winter), and I am a Bear, according to her, and nothing else matters. She – my trophy. I am very fortunate, but she won’t share my love for the road with me, not yet.
I am working for the two of us, I hadn’t worked much overtime last years to spend more time with her, and now money is tight, after the winter vacation, so we are hibernating together in the winter. Snow covered tree limbs outside my window. In April-May there is six weeks of beautiful Spring weather in New York, when the sky is blue, the Sun is warm, and you don’t need air conditioning yet. Ergo for the Indian Summer in September. I been dreaming about these and been working overtime. I will hit the road again and go riding the rails. I am dreaming of Spring.
