Went on a little road trip last night. Well, I shouldn't say little. I went all the way around the world.
See, I was Jones'n fo' adventure but couldn't get on a plane just then. Thankfully though, intrepid You Tube video bloggers had (at one time or another) gotten on a plane for me. What a time saver!
Don't know where I started from, I think I let my imagination soar and went to a place I'll probably never go to in real life- The Ukraine. Gramps on Dad's side was born in that 'country', in a medium-sized city on a border river, and damn if I wasn't able to be looking at the streets of the city Gramps had grown up in within minutes! It was a surprisingly nice place, very European. It looked to be a city that had been very well thought out and amazingly, for a former deep Eastern Bloc communist country that had also been through WWII, this city looked like it had not experienced the ravages of war or communism much and had been quite well preserved. Maybe growing up here answered a question in my mind, that being why Gramps always had such a good disposition. He obviously got it from being immersed in some righteous culture.
Next I went to another place I'll probably never go to, one of those places that would be interesting to visit but it's in a country that I'm not particularly fond of. I went to Saudi Arabia, to the Rub’ al Khali desert, better known as The Empty Quarter. Just outside of whatever town you happen to be in there are nothing but sand dunes stretching into the desert farther than can be imagined. So inhospitable is this region that it defies belief- but there in the video people were venturing out into the desert anyway. Geez- the country itself ain't so friendly and they just have to go out into the even unfriendlier parts of it.
That's what you gotta like about these video bloggers. They go wherever you type 'em to go- and then some.
Next I went to Northern India and briefly hooked up with a band of guys riding motorcycles on some city-to-city road trip. The scenery looked dead boring flat, they were driving on the left (yuk), and there was a lot of truck and other motorcycle traffic. Looked like the kind of place I would never miss seeing. There were also videos to peruse of the street food to be found in the region but nah, not interested.
Nairobi, Kenya I went to next and there found myself driving on the ring road around the capital city. Looked just like about everywhere else I've ever been though all the people on the billboards were African and there were a lot of Mercedes cars and trucks. Yes/no to going there.
Iceland! Why not? Flew instantly up there and this guy was talking sideways into his phone while the video showed what it was like to be walking down the street in Reykjavik. It was January but warmish for Iceland at 48 degrees Fahrenheit. The guy looked a bit cold and I could see his breath in the damp chill air. Reykjavik looked like a typical upscale Scandinavian town (I have seen videos of cities in Norway and Sweden so I know).
Next I found myself at the Blue Lagoon, some sort of vast natural hot springs area where the water is kind of a bluish white. Kind of attraction I would like to say I had visited but the only time I was in Iceland I was stuck at the damn airport, switching planes. Not much of a chance for exploration there.
I do believe we’re lookin’ at Santorini here.
Alan Bicknell- Unsplash.com
Santorini, Greece was another place I had almost been to. At the time I wanted to go there I couldn't get from the island I was on (Rhodos) to Santorini because it was storm season and the ferries weren't running that far out into the Aegean Sea. Some intrepid You Tube travelers, however, had made their way to the island in much more benign times and had reported back. These were the dreaded early twenties female videographers, though. A tribe of about five of em, led by a savvy techie one who was probably trying to finance further excursions to exotic places. Every shot, it seemed, was filled by a posing fem who wanted to showcase her tight bod against a backdrop of exotic scenery. Okay. Got it! Time to move on.
Puerto Vallarta, Mexico I went to next, only because it was the first location word that popped into my head. I clicked on another fem video because it looked better than the other offerings and sure enough, there our subject was, atop some balcony, posed in a flowing white dress like she was a Hollywood starlet on vay-cay. A drone camera then pulled up and away, revealing that the balcony she was standing on was atop a building in the middle of the city of Puerto Vallarta! How incredibly amazing was that?! This golden gal had been reveling in a million dollar view! Lucky her! Wow! Or should I say- AWESOME!? I've run out of adjectives.
I had to pass on her, after fast forwarding a bit, when I hit the point where she was walking through the town's marketplace marveling at the offerings. Ho-hum! Every tourist town on earth has a tourist trap marketplace and also, the video was quickly gettin' to be all about her.
Next off to Morrocco I went, or tried to, but all I saw were what looked like lame offerings. A few of the videos were about how these people got scammed in the Marrakesh market. No! Not the famed Marrakesh market, where vendors have probably been scamming tourists for over a thousand years!
Akron, Ohio next, a little closer to home. Why there? Never been, and Devo (the band) is from there. Good enough reasons.
Well, it's not like the video bloggers were trying to showcase this town. All I saw was stuff about gangs. Sheeeit! Toledo, Ohio- same thing. WTF??
Fairfield, Iowa seemed necessary to visit after that, home of Transcendental Meditation's Maharishi International University. Right in the middle of this sleepy farm town the TMers had landed, many years ago, where they took over an abandoned community college and built two large domes that the students of the university meditate in twice a day. I visited this place once but couldn't get into the domes. Oprah, though, had visited and had been able to gain entrance. Damn her! Woman gets access. There she was, in an old video, being led inside a dome temporarily devoid of meditators and given a tour. She asked the tour guide, the mayor of the town, if he had received any flack about the ‘TMers being a cult’. The mayor looked miffed at being asked that Intrepid Investigative Reporter question. Oprah might have overstepped her bounds there by using the 'c' word but that's Oprah, that sort of thing is in her roots. She just can't help it.
After that, I even took a visit to my old home town and discovered that there had been flooding recently. The ol' Wisconisn river had overflowed its banks some. The drone camera kept on focusing on the floodwaters that were submerging one of the local parks, which I thought was incredibly lame, 'cuz brotha, that happens damn near every year.
Last thing that happened is (don't know how I got there) I zoned out overly long on the utterly fascinating video of five huge John Deere combines harvesting a 2800 acre cornfield somewhere in Kentucky. That there is one hell of a lot of corn, enough to fill untold amounts of Santitas Corn Chips bags! The operators of the combines didn't even have to steer the things, they were controlled by GPS. The narrator of this riveting video said that these guys couldn't tarry long as the field had to be turned over and replanted with winter wheat, and then after that was harvested, I think soybeans were next. Geez can you give the soil a break there, Hoss? Didn't seem like he was going to.
'Bout then it was time to get off the road and call it a day. What a ‘long strange trip’ it had been. I felt tired, even though I hadn't left the sofa. I also noticed I wasn't Jones'n to be on the road anymore. Would've been better to see some of that stuff, experience some of that stuff, in person, but you know, you only got so much time and money. Fast forwarding through life to get to the good stuff just makes economic and physical sense sometimes. In doing this short-cutting I experienced zero draining of the wallet. As well, I did not suffer any jet lag, gastric distress, or sleep deprivation, all usual parts of the travel experience.
But, you can only rest so long. The spirit calls for new and unusual, the body calls for physical exercise, the senses like to experience the full immersion that the travel arena provides like none other, and fourthly, quite frankly, is the fact that watching travel videos is like watching movie trailers. No matter how good they are they’re not the same thing as watching actual movies. So, knowing from experience those four things to be true, once I get my sea legs back I think I'll be up for hittin' the road again. This time though, I'm gonna travel four and five star. I’m (experienced traveler) gonna check things out in a lot of locations before I pack my case. I’m gonna hang with upscale people and see how the upper crust, maybe even the one percenter’s, live.
I'm absolutely sure lots of You Tube folks are gonna help me with that.