Monday, October 3, 2016

Avoiding Toledo, technology free


My granddaughter Grayce loves maps. They way they look. The places they delineate.

I’m thinking about her and her passion as I panic because I need a map. We’re barreling toward Toledo and I do NOT want to spill onto the city streets to do battle with tiny turns and tree branches.  We’re towing a 38-foot fifth wheel that's about 13.5 feet high. 

I want to avoid Toledo.

But I don't know how. And my phone’s map app is crashing and my GPS is a pathetic bully. Technology fails me today.

So I reach under the back seat and grab my Rand McNally — an oversized coverless compendium of places we’ve been and places we want to be. I flip to Ohio and within seconds I’ve navigated us out of Toledo’s grasp and into the arms of Route 20.

 Where we stay for hours and hours. Watching corn grow. And cows graze.  Enjoying scrubbed up old towns, palms up for a tourist's dime. We see wafting clouds of starlings and hawks chasing their prey.  And classic barns, grain elevators, Mom-and-Pop stores, aging trucks for sale in varying degrees of decay. I love the white-steepeled churches with congregations of graves just outside.

Yes. Yes. Had I used the technology to get from here to there I would be there already and I’m not. I’m sitting in a Wal-Mart parking lot somewhere in Indiana instead of Illinois, listening to a train passing by. And my Rand McNally is nearby. It’s my new best friend. 

My granddaughter loves maps.

So do I.




3 comments:

Wendy B said...

I love the way you write, Nancy!!! Look forward to reading about your adventures!!!

Unknown said...

Safe travels Nancy lol forward to all the places you will go.

Bob Niedt said...

"...congregations of graves..." God, I LOVE that. Gorgeous.